Word: orbiteer
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After three years as ambassador to Outer Mongolia, Old Bolshevik Vyacheslav M. Molotov, 70, arrived in Vienna last week to represent Russia on the International Atomic Energy Agency. But there was no indication that his career was back in high Soviet orbit. Flying from Moscow (where news of his shift had not even been published), Molotov stopped off in Kiev, was recognized by a group of Soviet army officers, who nudged each other but neglected to pay any other recognition to the square-jawed Red who was once Stalin's right-hand...
...argued for years about this tenuous stuff: one theory holds that interplanetary space is filled with "resident" gas that has nothing to do with the planets; another claims that the outer fringe of the sun's glowing corona sometimes reaches out as far as the earth's orbit. The issue remained in doubt for the simple reason that no one had actually sampled interplanetary space, but in Britain's New Scientist Professor Josif Shklovsky of Moscow's State Astronomical Institute tells how Soviet space probes have measured the gas directly...
When Echo first took to space on Aug. 12, it was as round and polished as a giant ball bearing, its aluminized Mylar film kept tightly inflated by 20 Ibs. of vaporized anthraquinone, a normally solid organic chemical. When its 100-ft. sphere moved on its orbit 1,000 miles away from the surface of the earth, it covered about one-tenth the angle of the planet Venus at 40 million miles, but it did not show as a disk even in a powerful telescope. The sun reflecting on its spherical surface showed as a mathematical point, as stars...
...shadow of the Earth, but on Aug. 24 it dipped into darkness for two minutes while passing over the U.S. West Coast. Each day its stay in the shadow will increase, until in late December the balloon satellite will be in darkness for 35 minutes of its 118-minute orbit. When it goes into the shadow, it shrinks a bit, but Dr. Jaffe does not know how much...
Echo's orbit has changed very little, but no one can say for sure how long it will last. All its gas pressure is probably gone by now. The only reason it keeps its shape is that the forces that tend to shrink or distort it are extremely small. Slater estimates that meteorites nibble away about 1¼ sq. in. of its skin per day. Eventually the sphere may collapse, pushed to a pancake by air drag and pressure of sunlight, or drawn together by the Mylar's "memory" of the way it was folded in the launching...