Word: spacecrafts
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Even as the robot was sending data to its orbiting mother ship for relay back to scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the other probe of the eight-year-old $1 billion Viking program was closing in on Mars. The twin Viking 2 spacecraft is scheduled to send still another lander to the Martian surface on Sept. 4, either to expand the search or to stand in for Viking 1 should something go amiss with the first lander. Scientists rate Viking's chances of a successful landing at 70%. Unlike the Apollo lunar module, which could...
...Newton is also a curiously vulnerable superbeing. He is intrigued by a Southwestern hotel clerk named Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), dogged by a curious scientist named Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), whom he eventually hires and who betrays him. Newton plans to use his vast industrial resources to build a spacecraft that will return him to his dying planet, the tiny population of which will then be borne to earth. This idea does not go down well on terra firma. People in high places feel threatened. Newton's mission is aborted; he is imprisoned, marooned, left...
Hoping to answer that planetary puzzle, the Soviets last June launched two more unmanned spacecraft, Venera (Venus) 9 and 10. Last week, after arcing across 186 million miles of space, the first of the probes approached its target and released a small lander, emblazoned with hammer and sickle. After deploying a balloon-like French-designed parachute system, the vehicle descended slowly through the atmosphere and made a soft landing. Prechilled in the coldness of space, the probe's instruments survived 53 minutes on the torrid surface-three minutes longer than the last Russian lander. They radioed a flood...
...last U.S. craft to venture near Venus was Mariner 10; it took the first closeup pictures of the Venusian clouds in February 1974 en route to the sun's innermost planet, Mercury. In 1978 NASA hopes to launch an equally ambitious probe. A Pioneer spacecraft will drop five separate exploratory packages into Venus' atmosphere-provided, of course, that budget cutters do not kill the mission before it gets off the ground...
Perhaps. But the conference heard little new evidence to shake skeptics, presumably including the observers from the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Air Defense Command. Before repeating the tale of his brief "capture" by a spacecraft that landed near Pascagoula, Miss., in 1973, Fisherman Charles Hickson prudently refused to go through with a promised polygraph examination. On one thing the conferees did agree: in the future the squabbling UFO groups-the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)-will pool their findings and allow Hynek...