Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...basis of preliminary data reflecting eccentricities in the spacecraft's orbit, scientists came to an unexpected conclusion: the moon, like the earth, may be slightly pear-shaped. Instead of being a perfect sphere, the moon seems to be depressed about a quarter of a mile out of shape at its south pole and bulges out about the same distance at its north pole. Because the moon has a diameter of about 2,200 miles, the distortion would hardly be noticeable when viewed from the earth. Said a NASA official: "Let's not expect to go out and look...
Equipped with everything that it will carry to the moon except the astronauts and their sleeping couches, the Apollo system, weighing 56,900 lbs., or more than seven times the Gemini spacecraft, blasted off from Cape Kennedy riding the nose of a 22-story-high Saturn 1 rocket. After separating from the Saturn booster, Apollo fired its own rocket engine and soared to a peak altitude of 706 miles over South Africa. Then, as the space ship began to descend, its engine was fired three more times in successful tests of its capabilities...
Snapped from 133 miles away, the orbiter's first pictures showed the crater-pocked flatlands and adjacent ridges of the Mare Smythii region on the right-hand rim near the lunar equator. Later, the spacecraft snapped a 930-mi.-high shot of the moon's mysterious back side. Even so, the strong picture signals from the high-resolution lens were extremely fuzzy, primarily because of difficulties in the spacecraft's camera system...
While contending with the implications of that problem, Mission Project Manager Clifford Nelson was delighted with how easily the spacecraft had first kicked into lunar orbit. "It was like switching it from one railroad track to another," he bragged. As the week passed, the orbiter's original elliptical path slowly became circular because of irregularities in the earth's gravitational pull. Even so, the orbital change will apparently not endanger the spacecraft's mission of taking several hundred pictures of assorted lunar sites...
Because of increasing camera problems, project controllers huddled at week's end, trying to decide whether to scrub the scheduled plan of lowering the spacecraft to within 28 miles of the lunar surface in order to photograph nine target areas where astronauts may some day walk (see diagram). At that height, the orbiter's high-resolution 600-mm. lens could shoot objects as small as a card table. At last they decided to go ahead, hoping that under different conditions of lunar orbit, the camera might well begin operating properly again...