Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From the Kennedy Space Center and the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome, powerful shuttles and unmanned rockets lift off week after week, bearing construction modules and fuel supplies to a giant space station in earth orbit. There, skilled workers have been assembling the ship that will take the first humans to Mars. After more than a year of construction, the million- pound, ungainly looking spacecraft is ready. With a crew of eight, it separates from the space station and heads for Mars, following the Hohmann ellipse, a space trajectory that may one day be as familiar as a great-circle...
Stifled by budget cuts and foundering without clear-cut goals, NASA has scheduled only one Mars probe, the Mars Observer, which will go into orbit around the planet in 1993 to collect data on climate and geology. And while President Reagan agreed at the recent Moscow summit to a cautious joint communique describing "scientific missions to the moon and Mars" as "areas of possible bilateral and international cooperation," the Administration has been at best lukewarm to the concept of exploring Mars, jointly or otherwise...
When Mariner 9 was successfully inserted into low orbit around Mars in 1971, a planet-wide dust storm obscured its vision for six weeks. After the dust settled, Mariner's cameras revealed a fascinating landscape: towering volcanoes, great canyons, lava flows and a multitude of craters in the red- hued plains. What excited scientists and Mars buffs the most, however, was the unmistakable traces of dry riverbeds and deltas etched into the rock, evidence that water had once flowed freely on the Martian surface. Had life evolved on Mars while water was still ample? And might living organisms still exist...
NASA's more immediate concern is proving that it can get Discovery safely into space and back again. Most Americans, who will be watching on launch day, are just as anxious as NASA to see the shuttle program back in orbit...
...which can boost payloads at least three times as great as those on the U.S. shuttle, the Soviets would provide an extra capability to ensure sufficient backup fuel supplies. They believe they can deploy a space shield or parachute to slow their spacecraft enough to enable it to enter orbit around Mars without the use of retrorockets that draw on precious fuel supplies. Soviet scientists concede that this "aerobreaking" technique is still experimental...