Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Groping for Gravity. Last Wednesday the orbiter's Atlas-Agena boosters lofted the 850-lb. craft into a parking orbit, where it coasted for 28 minutes while ground computers honed its next course. Then, high above the Indian Ocean, the second-stage Agena engine reignited and kicked the orbiter into its precise moon-bound path. Two antennas and four solar-power panels snapped out, giving the space craft a windmill look. Guidance sensors aligned it with the sun; some six hours later, a star tracker began hunting for Canopus. When the sensor repeatedly failed to lock onto the guidance...
...week's end, the orbiter was scheduled to reach a crucial point 550 miles away from the moon. There, plans called for firing its retrorocket for 9½ minutes and cutting its speed from 6,000 m.p.h. to 2,000 m.p.h. Purpose: to let the moon's gravity capture the spacecraft and pull it into "loose lunar orbit" on an elliptical course ranging from 120 to 1,150 miles above the moon...
...valedictory. Included was a tragic timetable: "12:30 a.m.?Mother already dead. 3 o'clock?both dead." He hated his father "with a mortal passion," he wrote, and regretted that his mother had given "the best 25 years of her life to that man." Clearly, the erratic orbit of his mind had already carried him off to some remote aphelion of despair. "Life is not worth living," he wrote. He had apparently concluded that if it were not worth living for him, it need not be for the others, either. With the special lucidity of the mad, Whitman meticulously...
...solar system -- that is, they revolve around the sun. They will not all remain in our solar system: it is known that certain ones will eventually escape, perhaps to be picked up be another star. It has been estimated that there are a hundred billion comets in orbit, Marsden said...
...tricky first orbit rendezvous over the Pacific with an Agena launched before the Gemini, simulating the critical Apollo-Lunar Excursion Module moon rendezvous...