Word: probe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last week's failure put an ignominious end to the $40 million hurried-up Atlas-Able lunar probe program. Rather than try again with Atlas-Able, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last week called off future moon shots until next summer, when more powerful rockets are due to be available: the Centaur and Agena B which, atop the Atlas booster, will provide more efficient thrust in the upper stages, should be able to carry payloads of up to 700 lbs. to the moon. But with the U.S. out of the running now for at least six months...
Howard E. Menzel, professor of Astrophysics, confirmed last week that the Freshman Astronomy seminar has made what may be an important contribution to the success of the Mars "fly-by" probe...
...probe consists of a satellite to be launched in 1962 that will attempt to photograph Mars at close range. The Freshmen proposed that instead of storing the photographs on magnetic tape, the satellite should be equipped with video tape. The video tape would permit the probe to take and store more than 500 photographs when the satellite was closest to Mars, instead of the four or five possible was magnetic tape...
...master standard must be at least ten times more accurate than the practical measuring systems that are derived from it, and modern industry began to call for tolerances expressed in millionths of an inch. An error of this infinitesimal order in a gyro guidance system might send a space probe to the wrong planet, millions of miles off the track...
...Russian space scientists reasoned that any gas outside the earth's atmosphere would be ionized-broken into electrically charged particles-by the sun's radiation. So they furnished their space probes with ion traps: simple instruments that give electrical signals whenever a charged particle hits them. The Soviet moon probe launched on Sept. 12, 1959 carried four traps adjusted to respond to ions of different energies, and it telemetered 12,000 measurements back to the earth...