Word: skylab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After their difficult and dangerous attempts to dock with and repair the first U.S. space laboratory finally succeeded, the Skylab 1 astronauts last week settled down to work in their cavernous home in the sky. They made scientific observations of the earth and sun, performed biomedical tests on themselves, and even feasted on some of the foods that NASA had feared would spoil in Skylab's scorching temperatures. The outlook seemed bright. Asked whether they expected to remain aloft for a full 28-day mission, Commander Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. replied unhesitatingly: "You betcha...
Conrad's optimism was short-lived. Before the week ended, a second critical storage battery had failed, further depleting Skylab's already reduced power supply. After an emergency meeting in Houston, top NASA officials concluded that there was only one hope. To provide more electrical power, the astronauts would have to take a space walk outside the ship this week and attempt to free the inoperative solar panel that remains jammed in the side of the orbital workshop (the other workshop panel was ripped off completely during Skylab's launch...
...renewed crisis occurred after the astronauts thought they had their electrical problems well in hand. Power available from the four working windmill-shaped solar wings atop Skylab's telescope mount, and from fuel cells in the adjoining Apollo command module, was only about half what scientists had considered necessary for the mission. But by prudent rationing (turning off unnecessary lights, curtailing some experiments), the astronauts were able to perform most of their scheduled tasks. When they flipped Skylab over to begin earth-surveying photography with six high-resolution cameras, the functioning solar panels were turned away from...
That eventually caused the opening of some circuit breakers, which are set to trip when 80% of a battery's power has been drained. Although the astronauts were able to recharge the batteries after Skylab resumed its normal orientation toward the sun, another battery -the second since launch-failed completely; still others were operating at much less than full power. The batteries had apparently been damaged both by high temperatures and by the added work load put on them...
...world are preparing to examine the comet in many frequencies of light -from ultraviolet to infrared. Harvard's A. Edward Lilley even hopes to detect, for the first time, microwave emissions from a comet. Above the earth's obscuring blanket of air unmanned satellites-perhaps even Skylab's sophisticated observatory-may make the most fruitful observations of all. All the observations will be aimed at determining the structure of the comet and its origin-probably beyond the planet Pluto, where billions of comet-like objects are believed to be orbiting as remnants from the solar system...