Word: skylab
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...million miles. (That record-breaking performance contrasted sharply with the current manned space efforts of the Soviets, who last week launched two cosmonauts, Vasily Lazarev, 45, and Oleg Makarov, 40, on a two-day orbital mission.) Regularly putting in 12-to 16-hour days despite their initial nausea, the Skylab 2 astronauts accomplished nearly twice as much scientific work as planned. They took over 100,000 pictures of the sun, earth and stars, collected enough data on the earth to cover 18 miles of magnetic tape, and performed so many other technical and biomedical experiments that scientists will be kept...
...astronauts were not given much chance to talk, their doctors had no hesitation about speaking out. After completing preliminary shipboard medical examinations, they declared that the trio appeared to be extremely fit-in better shape, in fact, than the returning Skylab 1 astronauts, who were in space only about half as long. The prolonged exposure to zero gravity did take its toll...
Solar Cycle. Other earthlings aboard Skylab did not fare as well. The spider Arabella, which became famous by demonstrating that it could spin a web in zero G, survived the return to earth. But its arachnid companion Anita died before the end of the mission, apparently of starvation; Anita stubbornly refused to eat the morsels of filet mignon that were offered. Other casualties were the two minnows that had been carried aboard Skylab. However, their offspring - the first earth creatures to be born in space (except, perhaps, for some offspring of stowaway bacteria on earlier nights) - made it safely...
...Skylab 2's most important scientific contribution may well be the mass of solar pictures and data gathered with a $121 million array of solar telescopes...
...months or even years before the 200 solar scientists working on the Skylab program can digest the information. But some important discoveries have already been made, particularly about the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere. During the mission, at a time in the eleven-year solar cycle when the sun should be relatively quiet, two exceptionally large flares suddenly appeared; one of them expanded over an area 17 times the diameter of the earth. Under the direction of Garriott, a solar scientist by profession, the awesome event was photographed and measured from the first minutes of the eruption. Their...