Word: orbiter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...weather satellite called Essa (for the Commerce Department's Environmental Science Services Administration), Beulah's every move was tracked and reported round the clock by radio, thus permitting more than 150,000 Texans to dodge the big storm's flailing fist. Watching from a polar orbit 865 miles above the earth, Essa's twin TV cameras gave the Texas Gulf Coast twelve days' advance warning on her course. In the Caribbean and Mexico, where Beulah rampaged for two weeks before striking Texas, the storm took about 40 lives-in part because of inadequate radio warning...
...shut. The leakage slowed but did not stop. Within an hour, helium pressure had dropped from 5,000 lbs. to 3,000 lbs. per sq. in. Dejectedly, some JPL scientists suggested that it would be best to fire Surveyor's retrorocket immediately, placing the craft in high earth orbit. It would be preferable to have a live spacecraft in orbit, they argued, than a dead one on the surface of the moon...
...vinegar gnats, 1,000 flour beetles, 560 wasps, 120 frog eggs, 875 amoebae, 13,000 bacteria cells, 78 wheat seedlings, nine pepper plants, 10 million spores of orange bread mold and 64 blue spiderwort. All this was packed aboard a space ark called Biosatellite 2 and launched into earth orbit from Cape Kennedy...
Designed to test the effects of weightlessness on living organisms, the temperature-controlled Biosatellite was stabilized in orbit to provide less than 1/100,000th of the earth's gravity for its tiny occupants. It also was equipped with a strontium 85 source that irradiated some of the organisms with gamma rays to determine whether the effects of radiation were different under weight less conditions...
...That Be?, in which she makes up an impossible situation, asks herself "How can that be?" and is disappointed if she cannot concoct a way it could be. She is unable to explain, for instance, why "an upside-down-speedboat made of rose petals was in orbit around the moon...