Word: spacecraft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Philip Klass. They pointed out that at Sary-Shagan the Soviets are apparently using Pavlovski generators, highly advanced devices that convert the energy released by controlled blasts of explosives directly into bursts of electricity. The Soviets probably already have an operational HEL that could "blind" U.S. reconnaissance spacecraft orbiting at an altitude of 240 km (150 miles...
...Calif., sent an electronic command leaping across 164 million miles of space. With that, Viking Orbiter 1, which has been faithfully circling Mars once every 47½ hours for the past four years, expelled its last puff of steering gas. No longer maneuverable, its electrical systems silenced, the unmanned spacecraft will now slowly sink until it finally crashes into Mars some time after the year...
Even the cool NASA professionals in the control room were not unmoved. With the orbiter's death came the end of another phase of the $1 billion Project Viking, the most ambitious mission to another planet to date. Back in 1975, twin spacecraft, each consisting of an orbiter and a lander, were sent off to Mars. A key objective: to determine if the Red Planet harbors life. After going into Martian orbit ten months later, the mated spacecraft split apart. Their spider-legged landers touched down on the surface, while the orbiters continued patrolling overhead, mapping the planet with...
...this plateau is literally out of the world-on Venus. Though the perpetual cloud cover of the earth's nearest planetary neighbor has kept its surface tantalizingly hidden, Venus' veil is being lifted by a gifted robot. The Pioneer-Venus Or biter spacecraft has been circling the planet since December 1978, analyzing its atmosphere and scanning and rescanning its surface with radar. Last week NASA released the first renderings of these extraterrestial data, revealing a dramatic and awesome landscape still in the process of formation. Though 60% of the Venusian topography consists of flat rolling plains, it also...
...designation for a kind of gravitational "hollow" that trails the moon in its orbit at a point equidistant from the moon and the earth. Lofted to this point, a spacecraft would remain locked in a fairly stable orbit around...