Word: solar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...speed agrees with your Doppler shifts." His characters may seem as standard as those in any war film (his monsters, though, are quite human), but most science-fiction writers proceed on the assumption, probably correct, that one man's neurosis, however interesting, is not very significant when the solar system he inhabits is about to be demolished...
...into an overcast sky with steadily increasing acceleration. Two minutes and 40 seconds later the second stage fired smoothly, then the third. Out from the sides of the globular pay load unfolded four strange paddles. As the "paddlewheel satellite" tumbled through space at 171 revolutions per minute, 8,000 solar cells in the 20-inch-square vanes picked up the sun's energy to charge the chemical batteries, send messages back to the earthlings. Seventeen minutes after launching, its first radio signals beeped to the tracking station in Manchester. England. By 1 o'clock Cape Canaveral passed...
Equally important is the data that Explorer VI will send back about its own solar-powered performance. If it continues to be successful, solar energy will be used to drive future U.S. satellite instruments and to operate orbiting TV scanners that will transmit unclouded images of the solar system. Last week, with a wink at Christopher Columbus and George Eastman, Explorer VI televised back a crude image of smudges and blurs-the first picture of the earth ever shot from so far out in space...
...side. As the solid-fueled third stage was about to fire some 150 miles above the earth, they snapped out into position. Each arm branched in two directions and each branch carried a flat paddle about the size of a checkerboard, covered with 2,000 silicon-based solar cells mounted on a thin plastic honeycomb (an elaboration of the light-collecting window in Vanguard I, which still draws in enough energy to keep the tiny satellite busily broadcasting 17 months after it was launched). At 22,000 m.p.h., the new 142-lb. satellite went into orbit (rotating 171 times...
...space to the question whether man can really get past the Van Allen radiation belts by entering space above the earth's poles. At week's end a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration reported: "The paddle wheel is doing well. It is converting solar energy into electrical energy. The signals are coming in loud and clear." If its perigee edges in too close to the earth, the paddle-wheel satellite still has a 5-lb. kick rocket that can be fired to elongate its orbit; last week's launching was such a perfect shot...