Word: pioneers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Pioneer V, part of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration experiment headed by rumpled, energetic Dr. Abe Silverstein, 51, was originally intended to send a probe to the close vicinity of Venus. The best time for the launch would have been last June. But the payload was not ready then, and a launch scheduled for December was canceled because of instrument failure. By March, Venus was far away, but NASA decided to shoot anyway. Though the Venus probe will never probe Venus intimately, it can (if all goes well) gather vital information about interplanetary space...
...Pioneer V did not attain quite this speed, missing it by about 150 m.p.h. So instead of intersecting the orbit of Venus, it will stay about 7,500,000 miles outside. During each of its trips around the sun, which will take 311 days, Pioneer V will swing outward toward the earth's orbit. But only very rarely will the earth be there to meet it. NASA scientists estimate that at least 100,000 years may have to pass before Pioneer V gets close enough to the earth to burn up in its atmosphere...
...impossible to predict to what extent the orbit of Pioneer V will be disturbed by the gravitational pull of the earth and Venus...
Five Months Away. As Pioneer V curved toward the sun, the 5-watt transmitter performed perfectly, delivering reports from its sensing instruments: two radiation counters, a magnetometer to feel for magnetic fields in space and a device to count micrometeorites. When Pioneer V recedes a few million miles from the earth, a 150-watt transmitter will take over. NASA scientists estimate that Jodrell Bank will be able to hear Pioneer V 50 million miles away. It will reach the limit of this range in about five months...
...other space probes, one U.S. and the other Russian, have gone into solar orbits, but their radios went dead a few hundred thousand miles from the earth. Pioneer V's 150-watt transmitter is designed to work indefinitely. It will accumulate information in a recording device, send it in a five-minute burst, and then rest for five hours while the solar cells recharge its batteries. NASA scientists hope that it will still be transmitting in 1963 when Pioneer V will overtake the earth and again come within the 50 million-mile range...