Word: planet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Scheduled to begin this week, the journey will be the most spectacular ever undertaken from earth: an odyssey of two years and half a billion miles-including a hazardous stretch through the asteroid belt-to fly to within 87,000 miles of the planet Jupiter. If all goes well, the unmanned ship-Pioneer 10-will radio back the first closeup pictures of the giant planet, probe its intense magnetic fields and radiation belts and perhaps peek at one of the twelve Jovian moons. Then with the planet's powerful gravity acting as a slingshot, Pioneer will be hurled beyond...
...star to the center of the galaxy. That information should tell extraterrestrial scientists even a million years from now when and from where the spacecraft was launched. For specific details, they can look at a representation of the solar system (G). It shows that Pioneer left from the third planet from the sun (lower left), swept past the fifth (Jupiter) and then veered off into interstellar space...
Seen through the cameras of Mariner 9, the parched surface of Mars presents a scientific puzzle. Twisting gullies cut across the stark landscape like the traces of a mighty river system; yet scientists agree that there is now no free-flowing water on the Red Planet. How were the "riverbeds" made...
...mission that would have fired the public imagination and severely tested NASA's engineering ingenuity: an eleven-year flight to the very edge of the solar system. On one "Grand Tour," the spaceship would have swooped by Jupiter and with a whiplike assist from that planet's powerful gravitational field, flown past the ringed Saturn and finally Pluto, the outermost planet. In another version, the spacecraft would have used a similar "gravity assist" from Jupiter to swing by Uranus and Neptune instead of Pluto. Scheduled for the late 1970s, the Grand Tours would literally have been once...
When Mariner 9 arrived in the neighborhood of Mars last November, its TV cameras were thwarted by the billowing yellow dust clouds of a gigantic storm that obscured most of the surface of the Red Planet. Frustrated scientists and controllers at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to despair that their spacecraft would ever fulfill its primary mission: mapping the surface of Mars. But by mid-January the Martian skies had cleared, and Mariner began sending back detailed pictures. Last week NASA released the latest group of Mariner photographs. Transmitted across more than 100 million miles of space...