Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Wind & Orbit...
Before it blasted off from Cape Kennedy last week, the two-man spacecraft Gemini 10 faced a flight plan that was easily the most complex and ambitious ever designed for U.S. astronauts. By the time they splashed into the Atlantic after three days in orbit, Gemini's crew had collected an impressive variety of space-age records. With one after an other intricate exercise, Command Pilot John Young and his colleague, Michael Collins, wrote bright new chapters into the record book of space travel...
Ominous Shortage. Using the knowledge of orbital mechanics that had been refined during earlier Gemini missions, Young and Collins gradually maneuvered toward a rendezvous with the Agena 10 target vehicle that had been placed in orbit with a precise launch just 100 minutes before their own blastoff. They established radar contact with the Agena 10 during their second revolution, finally sighted the target some 50 miles ahead and 17 miles above. After rising to meet the Agena and nudging Gemini's nose into the Agena's receiving collar, Young coupled the two ships...
...Gemini-Agena combination reached a maximum height of 476 miles, carrying Astronauts Young and Collins to the highest altitude ever reached by man-well above the 354-mile record set by Russian Cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev during the 1965 flight of Voskhod II. In its lofty elliptical orbit, Gemini-Agena passed several times through the "South Atlantic Anomaly," an area where the lower portion of the Van Allen radiation belt dips to within a few hundred miles of the earth. Though the astronauts were exposed to radiation, it was only one-twentieth the strength that NASA scientists...
...high, far-flung orbit also placed the coupled craft in position to begin a rendezvous with a second target: Agena 8, lifeless but still riding on a nearly circular orbit after its role in the aborted Gemini 8 mission four months earlier. At first, last week's Gemini-Agena was 3,220 miles ahead of Agena 8; during the next several hours, the dead target ship-revolving around the earth every 99 minutes, compared to 101 minutes for Gemini-Agena-slowly passed the sleeping astronauts...