Word: orbiters
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...March 3--A roaring Juno II rocket was launched early this morning carrying Pioneer IV, a potential sun planet. The goal of Army scientists was to hurl a 13-pound gold-plated satellite past the moon, 221,000 miles away, in 34 hours and ultimately into a solar orbit a half million miles from earth...
Like a high-strung thoroughbred finally cured of its jitters, the much-criticized Vanguard ran a perfect race last week. Of seven earlier Vanguard firings, six had been failures, and the seventh put only a grapefruit-sized, 3.25-lb. satellite in orbit. Last week's shot was perfect. All three stages of the 72-ft., pencil-slim rocket fired without a hitch. The satellite, which had the full design weight of 21.5 Ibs., settled into an orbit slightly higher than had been expected. Its perigee (lowest point) is 347 miles above the earth; its apogee (highest point...
Vanguard II was the first big success for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Encouraged and confident, NASA outlined to Congress its ambitious program for peaceful space navigation. Some of its projects: ¶ An Atlas with a single upper stage to put a 3,000-lb. satellite in orbit (available soon...
...first problem that had to be met was the inability of the computer programs to keep up with the satellite in calculating the orbit. Preliminary plans expected the satellite to be higher up than it was and so did not account for the rapid changes in the orbit's elements, caused by its encounter with the earth's atmosphere. These variations in velocity nearly drove the mathematicians crazy, for they showed no apparent regularity. Now it is know that if a satellite encounters atmosphere its angular momentum is decreased, and this produces a decrease altitude and a decrease in period...
...varying atmospheric density, over a period from April to December, 1958. The third graph is the intensity of solar radiation during the same period, and shows how peaks and troughs occur together on the three lines. The lower plot measures the angular position of the low point of the orbit and indicates a general trend...