Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tactics of Delta warfare are far from ideal. Helicopters swoop in low and drop troops in the open. Other armed choppers orbit overhead, ready to help out if the enemy is in the trees, but the infantryman must slog forward, sinking up to his knees at times in oozing, smelly mud, wading through canals that cut across the fields every few hundred yards, and finally rushing into the village to overrun the enemy's positions. Vietnamese troops, who seldom weigh much more than 100 Ibs., move with considerable ease through the mud and can keep going from sunup...
...Orbiter is scheduled to complete the tedious transmission of its pictures by Dec. 10. Shortly afterward, having carried out a practically perfect mission, it will be ordered to fire its retrorocket, drop out of orbit and plunge to destruction on the moon below...
Missing the Eclipse. After two successive 24-hour postponements caused by malfunctions in their Titan rocket's guidance system, Astronauts Lovell and Aldrin finally soared into orbit in Gemini 12. Using an optical tracking device in place of the faulty radar, they successfully rendezvoused and docked during their third orbit with an Agena target vehicle that had been fired aloft 99 minutes before Gemini...
...flight plan next called for a boost to a 460-mile-high orbit, but that had to be canceled when telemetry disclosed problems with Agena's propellant pump. Instead, the astronauts made another and equally remarkable rendezvous-with the moon's circular shadow, which was racing across the Pacific at 1,060 m.p.h. during Saturday's eclipse of the sun. In the brief seven seconds that they flew through the corridor of total eclipse, the astronauts shot movies and still pictures of the blacked-out solar disk. Then, standing in the open hatch of his orbiting platform...
...course took it through the middle of the main cluster of Leonids that follow closely behind the parent comet; it encountered a vastly larger number of meteoroids than usual. Just 33 years later, in November 1866, there was another fiery but less spectacular shower; the main cluster orbiting the sun once every 33¼ years was still three months away. In 1899 and 1932, at the time of the November encounter, the main cluster was even farther away. Both times there were only disappointingly modest increases in the Leonid showers-partly because of the meteoroids' 33¼-year orbital...