Word: spacecrafts
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...cosmic enigmas like black holes and the faint radio noises that may be an echo of the creation, an ordinary planet, even the second largest in the sun's family, hardly seems likely to awe or surprise. Yet, remarkably, Saturn still has that power, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft so dramatically showed last November. Swooping within 78,000 miles of the luminous ringed sphere, the little robot sent back a collection of full-color images as dazzling as any ever received from deep space...
Such phenomena seemed to defy the revered laws of classical physics. But scientists are about to get a chance to unravel these mysteries-and perhaps more. At precisely 11:25 p.m. E.D.T. next Tuesday, Aug. 25, a second spacecraft, Voyager 2, will finally reach Saturn after a four-year, 1.4 billion-mile flight. Ducking behind the planet (as seen from earth), it will skim to within 63,000 miles of the planet's cloud tops. Then Voyager 2 will plunge through the plane of Saturn's rings, brushing precariously close to that rocky debris. All the while...
...became apparent to Soviet doctors. Life aboard Salyut proved far from salutary. In spite of prolonged training on the ground, many of the cosmonauts could not hold their food down in the early days of a flight. Some had trouble getting to sleep, and were often awakened by the spacecraft's clattering and creaking. Others complained of fatigue and vertigo. In a revealing new book, Red Star in Orbit (Random House; $12.95), James Oberg offers some trenchant quotes from the flight diary of Salyut Cosmonaut Valeri Ryumin, who in three trips spent just short of a year in space...
Living aboard Salyut brought other hazards. In 1977, when Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko took a "space walk" outside the ship to look for some suspected damage, he suddenly saw his companion, Yuri Romanenko, drifting by. Romanenko, untethered to the spacecraft, had accidentally floated out of the cabin. Grechko caught Romanenko just as he was about to spin off into the void. On another flight, cosmonauts complained of repeated headaches. It turned out carbon dioxide was building up to dangerous levels in the cabin. The problem was solved by changing the air purifiers more often...
...areas like the heart. The body reacts swiftly. Apparently thinking it has more blood than it needs, it reduces production both of red blood cells and disease-fighting lymphocytes, making the space travelers more vulnerable to infections. (The cosmonauts found themselves spending more and more time scrubbing the spacecraft to curtail bacterial growth.) Such vital substances as sodium, potassium and calcium salts are lost from the body fluids. The muscles, no longer required to work against gravity, weaken dangerously, and at the same time bones begin to decalcify. Not until the cosmonauts step back on earth do they really experience...