Word: orbiter
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...DIED. ANDRIAN NIKOLAYEV, 74, Russian cosmonaut whose 1962 space flight set an endurance record; in Cheboksary, Chuvash Autonomous Republic. Nikolayev circled the earth 64 times in 96 hours in his record-breaking flight, during which he also became the first man in orbit to appear live on television. In 1963 he married Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, reportedly to help the Soviets study the effects of space travel on human reproduction. The couple bore two children, but divorced...
...breakneck 54,000 m.p.h.--four times its cruising speed--the ship was no longer flying toward the planet but falling toward it, on a high-speed trajectory that could send it skimming past Saturn and back out into space. If the ship was going to enter a stable orbit, it would have to fire its little braking rocket for 96 min., until it reached the right speed and position to dart upward through a gap in Saturn's rings and begin circling the giant world. But when it comes to the dense rivers of ice and rubble that form...
They'll get better. Although Cassini will never again be as close to the rings as it was last week, it took only black-and-white pictures on the way into orbit. From now on, it will shoot between 100 and 200 images a day, most of them in color. The spacecraft will assemble mosaics of the rings, photographing them section by section and arranging the pictures in sequence from the center of the bands...
...zone known as the Roche limit: the altitude above a planet at which the difference in gravity between the end of an object closest to the planet and the end farthest from the planet is great enough to pull the object apart while not pulling the remains out of orbit. Instead, the rubble disperses around the planet. Photographs of the debris could help confirm this phenomenon and could even turn up smaller, still undiscovered moons hiding within the rings...
Scientists already know of some moonlets that orbit inside the rings, sweeping areas clean of debris and accounting for at least two conspicuous gaps. Other tiny moons move along the outer rim of rings; these are the so-called shepherding moons that groom the ring edges and keep them sharp...