Word: orbiter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most of the operational missile-age hardware of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and is increasingly a testing ground for NASA. The first operationally fired Thor was launched from Vandenberg, and so was the first Atlas to be rocketed across the Pacific. The Discoverer series was launched into polar orbit, and the 1960 recovery of the gold-plated capsule of Discoverer XIII off Hawaii marked the first time an American object had been retrieved from orbit in space...
...potential problems of metals in space are numerous and annoying. But the tendency of metals to grab each other may have advantages too. When space vehicles are assembled in orbit, say National Research scientists, their joints may well be made of metals that cold-weld firmly as soon as they touch...
...Union, by fateful inadvertency, have ex ploded superbombs at almost exactly the same moment - one near the South Pole, one near the North Pole. The geostrophic jolt, statesmen grimly reveal, has knocked the earth 11° off its axis and, what is in finitely worse, has steeply deflected its orbit. In four months, scientists estimate, the earth will pass so close to the sun that the world will end in fire, and humanity will roast in a hell of its own making...
...Dicke does not propose to use any ordinary gravitational clock, such as a clock with a pendulum. He thinks that an earth satellite can be made to move in such a way that gas drag and light pressure will not affect its orbit. Such a satellite will, in effect, be a gravitational clock, its period of revolution around the earth governed by gravitational pull...
Send on Signal. Other instruments mounted on the drum record radiation from both sun and sky as the drum spins, and a neutron counter catches neutrons bounced up from the earth's atmosphere by the impact of cosmic rays. All the readings are recorded on tape during each orbit. When OSO passes over a Minitrack radio station, it is given a signal that makes the tape reverse its motion and quickly send its data down to earth...