Word: orbiter
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Convinced by the findings of the Apollo missions that the moon is lifeless, the earth's two superpowers were concentrating on the next target of opportunity: Mars. A pair of spacecraft, America's Mariner 9 and Russia's Mars 2, were in orbit around the Red Planet, seeking out conditions and features that might support life and radioing their findings back to earth across more than 90 million miles of space. A capsule ejected from Mars 2 lay on the Martian surface, possibly equipped with instruments that could sample the soil and the atmosphere and detect the presence of life...
...discovered during the current Mars missions seems highly unlikely. Mariner 9, mapping the planet with its twin TV cameras and using ultraviolet and infra-red sensors to probe the surface and the atmosphere, will never come close enough in its far-ranging 860-mile by 10,600-mile orbit to photograph any life forms. Although the Russians have announced that their Mars 2 lander carried a Soviet pennant to the Martian surface, they have been silent about the performance of any life detectors or other instruments it might have carried...
...Laboratory: the first closeup pictures of the two tiny moonlets of Mars. Deimos and Phobos. Sharpened and clarified by computers, the photographs finally laid to rest an enticing theory put forth a few years ago by Soviet Astrophysicist I.S. Shklovskii. who said that the apparent behavior of Phobos in orbit meant that it could be hollow. That in turn suggested to Shklovskii that the moonlet might be an artificial satellite, lofted into orbit by a long-extinct Martian civilization. Instead, Mariner's photos have revealed that both moonlets are irregular-shaped hunks of rock, pockmarked with craters...
...begin only on a planet or one of its moons; it is inconceivable to them that it can evolve among the molecules floating in space or within the nuclear fires of stars. But are there any planets outside the solar system? The capability of detecting a planet in orbit around even the sun's nearest stellar neighbor is beyond the power of the largest optical telescopes, but many astronomers are convinced that there are billions of planets in the observable universe. The sun, they note, is an ordinary star in an island of 100 billion stars, the Milky Way galaxy...
...Western scientists had expected Mars 2 to arrive at the red planet by week's end. Mars 3 five days later. As the days passed without any word from Moscow, there was growing concern that the first of the two Russian craft might have failed to go into orbit around Mars and sped by into distant space...