Word: spacecrafts
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After a 117-day journey across 180 million miles of space, the spherical Venera 8, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and a portrait of Lenin, plummeted toward the thin, sunlit crescent of Venus that is now visible from earth. Under its heat-resistant parachute, the 2,600-lb. spacecraft floated down through the thick, hot Venusian atmosphere. After it landed, it continued sending signals for about 50 minutes before it burned out on the scalding Venusian surface...
Pravda promptly hailed the second successful landing in eight Russian Venus probes as "another victory of Soviet science and technology." American scientists, who have sent two spacecraft flying past Venus, were quick to agree. By broadcasting from the surface 37 minutes longer than Venera 7 in December 1970, the latest space shot showed that the Soviet engineers had 1) designed a cooling system that could temporarily withstand the enormous surface temperatures of Venus (more than 900° F.) and 2) built a spacecraft that would not buckle under the planet's crushing surface pressures (about 100 times those...
...every sci-fi fan knows, one of the great hazards of space travel between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt: a doughnut-shaped stretch of floating debris that could fatally pierce the thin metallic skin of a speeding spacecraft. Now, for the first time, a real ship is beginning to run this rocky gauntlet. Success will increase the possibility of future missions to Jupiter and the other outer planets (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto...
...year in a near-polar orbit that runs almost parallel to the earth's axis of rotation. Sweeping down from high above the Arctic Circle to Antarctica, it will then head back north every 103 minutes. This orbit has an important advantage: it will bring the spacecraft back over the same spot on earth every 18 days at almost exactly the same time of day. Thus, ERTS's photographs, each covering a 100-by-100-mile square, will be taken at each particular site under lighting conditions that remain unchanged except for the gradual seasonal variations...
When Astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan conceived the idea of attaching a drawing of a nude man and woman to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, their motive was purely scientific. They wanted any extraterrestrial beings who might some day intercept the craft to know what kind of race had sent it. Since the March launch, however, the two scientists have discovered that the drawing is more than a message to outer space. "We didn't realize it," says Drake, "but it turns out to be a cleverly disguised Rorschach inkblot test...