Word: probe
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...Just as soon as we finish these pictures," said Armstrong. Scooping up the soil, he reported: "It's a very soft surface. But here and there, where I probe with the contingency sample collector, I run into very hard surface." Even his geologic descriptions bordered on the rhapsodic "It has a stark beauty all its own. It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here...
...thing the astronauts did not observe was Apollo's companion in lunar orbit?the Soviet Union's unmanned Luna 15 moon probe (see p. 17). Arriving in the neighborhood two days before the U.S. spacecraft, Luna went into an orbit as close as ten miles from the moon and eventually landed. The chances that Luna would be visible from Apollo 11?much less collide with it?were estimated by Houston's Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations, as about "one in a billion...
...toward their dramatic rendezvous with the moon last week, the Apollo 11 astronauts were aware that they would have company in the lunar neighborhood. With the aid of periodic news reports from Houston, they were able to keep track of the progress of Luna 15, the unmanned Soviet moon probe launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome three days before their blast-off from Cape Kennedy. The Russians cloaked Luna's mission in characteristic secrecy. Some scientists speculated that it was a "scoopy" shot designed to dig up some lunar soil and return it to earth before a manned Apollo mission...
...however, is only one of NASA's planetary targets-and a relatively close one at that. In 1972, the space agency will send two Pioneer spacecraft on a flyby of Jupiter, largest planet in the solar system. A year later, another Mariner will try the first multiple-planet probe. After a sweep of Venus, it will use the Venusian gravity to boost itself on toward Mercury, the sun's closest and smallest satellite. In the late 1970s, the so-called "outer planets" will be so favorably aligned that a spacecraft passing Jupiter could use its gravity to push...
...national character is like a genetic one; it may die in the grandfather only to reappear in the face of a child. Seemingly, whenever America has been in crisis, courage has been reasserted. The quality has both old and new dimensions in the technological age. Man's restless probes into the unknown have not exhausted his chances of danger and courage; they have merely spurred him to probe further. The more he knows, the bigger his frontier, from the atom to space. In a day of committee decisions and anonymous heroes, he has changed his style-but not much...