Word: rangers
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Died. Brace Beemer, 62, last of radio's Lone Rangers, whose booming "Hi Ho, Silver, Awaaay!" thundered across the air waves from 1941 to 1954 and found its echo in his private life, which he tuned to the Ranger's personality by abstaining from swearing, smoking and drinking, while zealously riding the country's rodeo circuit with black mask, pistol, bullwhip and his white steed named Silver; of a heart attack; in Oxford, Mich...
...Ranger VIII hit the ten-mile target at the correct speed, set itself at the proper angle to the sun and the earth, and kept in tight communication with its ground-control stations. About 17 hours after launch, the command came from its masters at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to prepare for the critical mid-course maneuver. Dutifully Ranger writhed in space, turning its gleaming golden body as it was told. It fired its small rocket engine for 59 seconds, and when it had writhed back again to cruising attitude, JPL scientists predicted that it would hit inside...
...Tranquillity was the target picked before the launch. Ranger VII had photographed a fairly smooth-looking place now called the Mare Cognitum (Known Sea) and found it to be pocked with small pits apparently made by chunks of rock tossed out of the crater Copernicus. A lunar landing vehicle might have serious trouble with such pits, and the hope was that the Sea of Tranquillity would prove to be smoother...
Ambitious Voyage. For 50 hours, Ranger VIII cruised through space, its speed gradually slowing under the backward pull of the earth's gravitation. Then it felt the forward pull of the moon's gravitation and began to gain speed. As the spacecraft curved into its final dive, it swept across the face of the moon at a lower altitude than its predecessor. In 23 minutes it sent back 7,000 pictures, nearly twice the number returned by Ranger VII, over a five-minute longer span...
...first pictures covered a rectangular area 200 miles wide and 400 miles long. In the final second before Ranger collided with the onrushing moon its cameras were snapping closeups of moon segments no larger than a city block. Even so, after scanning the lunar snapshots, scientists were still undecided whether the moon's surface would support a spacecraft. A "personal guess" by Dr. Gerard Kuiper, head of the scientific team analyzing the evidence, was that the moon is coated with a frothy substance that "may hide many treacherous things." The University of California's Dr. Harold Urey argued...