Word: saturns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Grissom, 40, Lieut. Colonel Edward White, 36, and Lieut. Commander Rog- er Chaffee, 31, lay dead in the charred cockpit of a vehicle that was built to hit the moon 239,000 miles away, but never got closer than the tip of a Saturn rocket, 218 ft. above Launching Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy...
Open-End Mission. As it was planned, the flight of Apollo 204 would have tested both the mettle and the technology of the three astronauts beyond anything that men had yet experienced in space. On Feb. 21, the capsule was to be fired off the ground by a Saturn 1-B rocket to go into orbit for as long as Grissom, White and Chaffee could take it, an "open-end" mission that marked a bold departure from the rigidly limited space flights of the past. It was to be essentially an engineering flight, a manned shakedown for the Apollo systems...
Countdown-Minus-10. At 1 p.m. on Friday last week, Grissom, White and Chaffee strolled casually into the gantry elevator on Pad 34, rose swiftly to a sterilized "white room," then ambled along the 20-ft. catwalk to the stainless-steel hull of the capsule, now secured to the Saturn rocket inside the launching complex. The craft was like an old friend, for they had spent hours in it during vacuum-chamber tests in the Houston Space Center, had run through identical launch-simulation procedures several times before...
...mannerisms. Though he prudently stayed in the shadow of his more experienced crewmates, Chaffee shared their burning ambition to land on the moon; in the den of his Houston home hangs a map of the lunar landscape. Last summer, after watching a spectacular launching of a Saturn rocket at Cape Kennedy, Chaffee, father of two, turned to his wife Martha, and exclaimed: "It's going to be a beautiful sight. I can't wait to take a ride on that bird...
Astronomers estimate that the new moon orbits Saturn once every 18 hours and is between 100 and 200 miles in diameter. It is thus slightly larger than Saturn's smallest moon (Phoebe) but dwarfed by the largest (Titan), which is 2,900 miles in diameter-nearly as large as the planet Mercury. Despite the diminutive size of the new satellite, its gravity is probably strong enough to cause significant perturbations in the orbits of the countless tiny particles that constitute the nearby Saturnian rings. Thus, in conjunction with the gravitational pull of some of the other inner Saturnian moons...