Word: spacecraft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...earth. But as they head farther into space, the time required for their radio signals to reach earth lengthens to minutes, and the ever widening gap between questions and answers makes conversation difficult. Now, with the earth more than 100 million miles away, Mars is looming in the spacecraft portholes, and the crew begins preparing for a yearlong adventure on another world...
...planet, glowing red and ever brighter in the night skies, is heading toward its closest approach to the earth in 17 years this September, tantalizingly near and beckoning. After a hiatus of a dozen years, during which neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union mounted missions to & Mars, a spacecraft is once again on its way, opening a new era in the exploration of the earth's closest planetary neighbor. During the next decade or so, the Soviets will launch a series of increasingly sophisticated unmanned Mars probes that they hope will culminate in a joint U.S.-Soviet manned mission...
Last week that trip moved a step closer to reality. From its launching pad at the Baikonur space complex, near Tyuratam in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, a Proton rocket carrying an unmanned spacecraft rose on an orange and blue column of fire that illuminated the night sky. Turning lazily eastward, the rocket sent the craft off on an ambitious mission: to scout Mars and probe Phobos, one of its two tiny moons. Far below at the sprawling complex, technicians swarmed over a sister ship that is scheduled to be launched this week on a similar mission. Exulted Roald Sagdeyev...
Finally, in 1965, the triumphant mission of the U.S. spacecraft Mariner 4 brought some reality to musings about Mars. The craft flew past the planet at a distance of only 6,100 miles, transmitting 22 television pictures of a bleak, moonlike landscape, pockmarked by craters and showing no signs of life. Even so, hope persisted. To demonstrate that a Mariner flyby at a distance of thousands of miles might completely overlook a thriving civilization, a young and still unknown Carl Sagan that same year sifted through a thousand pictures of earth shot by a weather satellite orbiting only 300 miles...
...part to answer such questions that the U.S. Viking 1 and 2 spacecraft, each consisting of an orbiter and a lander, were dispatched to Mars. When they arrived, 45 days apart, in 1976, cameras aboard the orbiters snapped away and remote-sensing devices searched for water vapor in the thin atmosphere and sought out frozen water in the polar ice caps. On the surface, the landers began providing the most accurate measurements yet of Martian surface temperatures, atmospheric density and wind velocity, while the cameras shot more than 4,500 spectacular close-up pictures of the surrounding, rock- strewn landscape...