Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vandenberg Air Force Base was chosen as a shuttle facility because it offers ideal conditions for launching spacecraft into polar orbit. Shuttles lifting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida enter a more or less equatorial orbit and fly over only part of the earth's surface. Spacecraft sent from Vandenberg into polar orbit will slice across the earth's twirling path and pass over a slightly different strip of the globe on each swing. Satellites placed in polar orbit have the capability of photographing any section of the earth. This gives them an intelligence-gathering potential significantly...
...Esposito found that 1978 sulfur dioxide levels in the Venusian atmosphere were 50 times as high as expected. Since then, the sulfur dioxide lev els have been slowly tapering off, just as they drop after a major volcanic eruption on earth. Another investigator, Fred Scarf of TRW Inc., the spacecraft's builders, disclosed that an on-board instrument called a plasma-wave detector had recorded repeated lightning discharges over two mountain regions. On earth, such electrical activity commonly accompanies volcanic outbursts...
Still more tantalizing, the lightning was detected above two mountainous regions called Beta and Atla, which sit astride the Venusian equator. These areas appear to be supported by younger, denser rock, a characteristic of terrestrial volcanoes. (Intriguingly, this was deduced from precise tracking of the spacecraft...
...week's end, it was truly coming home. Touching gently down on the Kennedy Space Center's long concrete runway, within sight of the towering gantry where it had taken off on its 3 million-mile odyssey eight days earlier, the winged ship became the first spacecraft of any nation to end its celestial wanderings where they had begun. From Mission Control, half a continent away, came heartfelt congratulations: "Welcome home. That was a fantastic...
NASA also has its eyes on another first. If winds and weather are fair in Florida at the end of Challenger's seventh day in orbit - and the problem of Palapa has been resolved - the winged spacecraft will land on the Kennedy Space Center's three-mile-long shuttle runway rather than on the hard-packed sands of California's Edwards Air Force Base. Such a feat would not only go a long way toward proving the shuttle's versatility but also save NASA at least $1 million a mission, the cost of piggybacking the orbiter...