Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Called off last week by the U.S. Air Force was the great capsule hunt in the icy wilds of Spitzbergen. There-somewhere-the telltale orange parachute with the instrumented nose capsule of Discoverer II was seen to drop into the mountains after it was ejected from orbit. And there Norwegian coal miners, U.S. air-rescue squadrons and helpful Norwegian helicopter pilots scoured the bleak, white mountains for eight days (TIME, April 27). The search-in which residents of a local Russian mining community participated on their own-was halted after the arrival of Colonel Theodore Tatum, air-rescue boss...
...small, glittering electrical parts weighing a pound or so, which might be a transmitter designed to broadcast its voice over thousands of miles of empty space. Near it was what looked like a cylinder of dirty pink soap. It was plastic foam, encasing apparatus that might be destined to orbit the sun until the end of the solar system. Puffing on a battered pipe, Van Allen peered, commented, sketched an idea for a new circuit, then was summoned to take a long-distance call from the Army's rocket lab in Huntsville, Ala. So the day began...
...motion and attitude in space. When the second-stage rocket separated, the inertial-reference package squirted jets of high-pressure helium out of orifices in the rocket's side, bringing it to a horizontal attitude. Then the rocket motor fired, driving the second stage into an orbit...
...Once in orbit, the little jets went back into action. To keep the satellite horizontal, they had to make it turn just as fast as it circled the earth: one revolution, one turn. This was done by an infrared scanner, which watched the line of the horizon ahead and released little spurts of gas to keep the satellite's attitude stable. This complicated operation seems to have worked well. As Discoverer II circled the earth, its directional radio signals kept at a steady level. If Discoverer had not been stabilized properly, they would have fluctuated as the satellite wobbled...
...first paddle-wheel satellite will not try for Venus, but will follow a long elliptical orbit that will take it about 30,000 miles from the earth. It will carry various instruments, but its principal job will be to answer promptly when spoken to. If all goes well, it will draw on its stored solar power and speak in a loud radio voice. Then its designers can judge whether a transmitter of this type can be made loud enough to be heard from Venus...