Word: orbiteer
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Pioneer's report, after covering the first million miles of its 500 million-mile orbit around the sun: "Everything is fine." Its internal temperature is 68° F., slightly lower than the standard temperature of a U.S. living room. The four paddles that collect solar energy for its radio are colder: 27° F. Eighty-seven slight impacts from , micrometeorites and five heavier ones were registered, but nothing really damaging. Other data will take months to interpret. Eventually they will tell about cosmic rays, magnetic fields and other space conditions between the earth and the orbit of Venus...
When Vanguard I, the U.S.'s second satellite, popped into orbit early in 1958, Nikita Khrushchev derided it as a "grapefruit." It was indeed small (6.4 in. in diameter, 3.25 Ibs.). But last week, as it completed its second year in orbit, Vanguard had proved to have two virtues that the massive Soviet satellites lack. First, it soared into so high an orbit (apogee 2,500 miles above the earth, perigee 400 miles) that the outermost fringes of the atmosphere exert almost no slowing effect on its motion. It has kept going while heavier competitors sagged into the atmosphere...
...falls, it will pick up speed from the sun's gravitational field and will creep ahead of the earth. After a while, it will be moving fast enough to stop falling and to maintain itself in an eccentric solar orbit. The more backward speed the probe has when it clears the earth, the slower it will be moving around the sun and the farther it will fall toward the sun before it goes into a solar orbit. To fall all the way to Venus, whose orbit is 25 million miles inside the earth's, a probe would have...
Pioneer V did not attain quite this speed, missing it by about 150 m.p.h. So instead of intersecting the orbit of Venus, it will stay about 7,500,000 miles outside. During each of its trips around the sun, which will take 311 days, Pioneer V will swing outward toward the earth's orbit. But only very rarely will the earth be there to meet it. NASA scientists estimate that at least 100,000 years may have to pass before Pioneer V gets close enough to the earth to burn up in its atmosphere...
...impossible to predict to what extent the orbit of Pioneer V will be disturbed by the gravitational pull of the earth and Venus...