Word: robotical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mission Control in Houston, as well as the Canadian builders, will be especially concerned with the tests of the robot arm. Truly, who will work the space crane with hand grips at an observation post in the back of the command cabin, had originally been scheduled to try the arm's gripping apparatus on a fixture in the cargo bay. But the trial was scrubbed because of problems with the arm's hand, known in NASAese as an "end effector." Eventually, the spider-web-like wire snare should be able to capture any satellite equipped with appropriately mated...
Also seriously threatened: VOIR (for Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar), a scheme to place a radar-equipped robot in orbit around Venus and map its cloud-covered surface. NASA officials are even talking about mothballing the Deep Space Network, a globe-girdling array of antennas that acts as a vital communications "downlink" with all U.S. unmanned planetary spacecraft. One effect of such a move would be to silence the transmissions of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is scheduled to pass by Uranus...
Still, after four years of traveling across 1.24 billion miles of space, there was no faulting Voyager 2's marksmanship. Indeed, one golf-minded scientist likened it to sinking a 500-mile putt. Superlatives were certainly in order last week as the semiautonomous robot completed the second lap of its epic flight: a rendezvous with the giant ringed planet Saturn, the spectacular finale to two ambitious decades of planetary exploration by unmanned U.S. spacecraft...
There was, however, a mysterious glitch. While Voyager 2 was hidden behind Saturn it developed the space-age equivalent of a crick in the neck, reducing the mobility of its cameras. But the robot had already accomplished most of its goals, and the trouble will almost certainly not prevent use of the cameras on the rest of Voyager 2's flight-past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune...
...ordinary planet, even the second largest in the sun's family, hardly seems likely to awe or surprise. Yet, remarkably, Saturn still has that power, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft so dramatically showed last November. Swooping within 78,000 miles of the luminous ringed sphere, the little robot sent back a collection of full-color images as dazzling as any ever received from deep space...