Word: spacecrafts
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...past three months, a strange moth-shaped satellite has been orbiting the earth in a nearly perfect polar orbit some 560 miles high. Sweeping down from the Arctic to Antarctica and back again every 103 minutes, the 1,965-lb. spacecraft has been taking as many as 752 pictures of the earth every day; each shot covers a 115-by-115-mile square. Unlike U.S. and Soviet spy satellites, which are on the lookout for military sites, the mission of NASA's first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1) is purely scientific. A direct spin-off of the space...
Since its launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base last July, the $112 million spacecraft has sent back more than 53,000 pictures of the earth. The photographic deluge is now being examined by more than 300 scientists, whose disciplines range from agriculture to volcanology. Says ERTS's scientific chief, Dr. Arch Park: "We're pleased and enthusiastic...
...could have been carved by torrents of water, possible tracks left by glaciers, sands whipped by winds of hundreds of miles an hour and other tantalizing features that point to previously unsuspected geological, chemical and perhaps biological processes on the red planet. Indeed, the flight of the windmill-shaped spacecraft drastically changed the image of Mars. Says Cornell Astronomer Carl Sagan, one of Mariner's principal scientists: "We have accumulated more information about Mars from the single mission of Mariner than from all previous observations in history...
...after its 698th pass around the planet, Mariner's mission has finally come to an end. Because the precious supply of attitude-controlling nitrogen gas has been exhausted, the spacecraft can no longer point its antenna toward earth for radio transmissions back to Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a result, Mariner's final 15 pictures remained locked on board. But scientists are hardly disappointed. Exceeding its expected working life of 90 days by eight months, Mariner yielded a total of 7,329 photographs, covering the entire surface of Mars as well as its tiny moonlets, Phobos...
...calculators are yet another consumer hand-me-down from the aerospace programs of the 1960s. The machine's brain is a tiny silicone chip coated with layers of metal oxide, and was originally developed for use in the guidance systems of missiles and spacecraft. The chip crams the calculating power of several thousand transistors into an amazingly tiny package, with the readout of problems appearing on a digital lighting panel. Prices range from $60 to $425, depending on the number of digits a model can handle and its extra features. By far the most important of these...