Word: spacecrafts
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...STAR (for Self-Testing And Repairing), the experimental electronic whiz is the prototype of a computer that is being designed for a most demanding assignment: guiding the first unmanned expeditions to Jupiter and the other outer planets later in the decade. These far-ranging planetary "grand tours" will carry spacecraft billions of miles from earth to the very edge of the solar system and take up to eleven years to complete. Unfortunately, even the most reliable of contemporary computers would almost surely suffer a failure of some of its components long before the end of such missions...
...photographed Mars last year and went into perpetual orbits around the sun, scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory conducted an important test. Using NASA's giant 210-ft. Goldstone antenna in the California desert, they beamed powerful radio signals past the sun toward the little unmanned spacecraft. When they reached the Mariners some 250 million miles away, the signals were automatically amplified on board and transmitted back to earth. The entire round trip took only about 43 minutes, but the results may be momentous for all of physics. Last week, at a conference on gravity at Caltech...
...J.P.L. experimenters reduced the margin of error to 4% or less by locating the distant spacecraft within 100 ft. of their actual position. Thus, when they calculated that the signal to Mariner was slowed down by 204 millionths of a second on its round trip, they dealt the Brans-Dicke theory a sharp if not decisive blow. Their measurement was only 4 millionths of a second off the Einsteinian prediction, but 18 millionths of a second off the Brans-Dicke figure...
...contradictory hot-and-cold atmosphere pervades current East-West relations. On one hand, the U.S. and Soviet Union are resuming their critical Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Helsinki this week. Last week the two powers agreed in Moscow to continue working toward compatible docking systems for their spacecraft, which could lead to eventual joint ventures beyond the earth. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, on his way home from a U.S. visit, became the first Soviet official of his rank ever to visit West Germany; while there, he conferred with Bonn's Foreign Minister Walter Scheel and hinted that...
...middle of the night, electrically controlled garage doors in a number of Western states suddenly begin to open and close. At Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, an outburst of strange signals starts disrupting communications with an orbiting Gemini spaceship. High above the Gulf of Mexico, the navigational gear of a jetliner bound for Miami mysteriously indicates that the plane is on a course for Cuba. Is a modern-day poltergeist on the loose? Not really. These baffling occurrences are, in fact, examples of a serious problem of the Electronic Age. As ever larger numbers of electronic gadgets come into...