Word: solarity
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...surface, DS1's prime assignment is to validate a host of new technologies NASA had always considered too risky to try on a high-profile mission. Says Marc Rayman of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, DS1's chief engineer: "We have an unproven propulsion system, powered by an unproven solar array, commanded by an unproven navigation system...
...solar system has a glamour world, Jupiter--with its brilliant colors, vast size and fruit fly-like swarm of 16 moons--has always been it. The planet appeared more elegant still in 1979, when the Voyager space probes discovered that it is circled by a fine set of nested rings...
Indeed, the thrusters actually caused SOHO to begin spinning with its two solar panels nearly edge-on to the sun rather than facing it. Without solar energy, SOHO's batteries quickly drained, cutting off power to all its systems...
...bottom and rotating once a minute, too slow to have caused structural damage. Even more encouraging, the geometry of SOHO's orbit was tilting the craft's axis of rotation toward the sun by about a degree a day. That was gradually increasing the amount of sunlight hitting the solar panels. Ground controllers ordered SOHO to store that intermittent flow of energy and recharge its batteries...
...faces of SOHO's solar panels tilt more and more toward the sun, controllers are alternately charging the batteries and using them to warm SOHO's slushy on-board hydrazine fuel, which nearly froze during the craft's dormancy. The hydrazine, when fully thawed, will be used to fire thrusters in a series of brief burns. That procedure should halt SOHO's spin, stabilize the observatory and face its solar panels directly toward...