Word: spacecrafts
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Finally, Coca-Cola's setbacks have extended even to outer space. Coke and Pepsi were aboard the latest flight of the space shuttle Challenger, but at a press briefing last week the astronauts said that neither soft drink was satisfying. Reason: the spacecraft has no refrigerator. Said Mission Commander Gordon Fullerton: "Warm cola is not on anybody's list of favorite things." --By Barbara Rudolph. Reported by Leslie Cauley/Atlanta, with other bureaus
...flew by Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1981, sending back spectacular pictures and mountains of data. Last week, still in good health after more than eight years in the void, Voyager 2 had closed to within 46 million miles of Uranus, its next target. The spacecraft's early shots of the mysterious planet, which is four times as large as the earth, were transmitted across 1.8 billion miles of space to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They depicted Uranus as a fuzzy blue-green ball, showed its five known moons and barely discerned the outermost...
Although light reaching the planet from the sun is only a quarter as bright as it was near Saturn, scientists expect Voyager's cameras (as well as its other instruments) to reveal considerably more detail as the spacecraft draws closer to Uranus and finally swoops to within 66,000 miles of its surface on Jan. 24. Voyager's odyssey will not end there. Accelerated to 45,000 m.p.h. and rerouted by Uranian gravity, it will soar still farther away from the sun, encounter Neptune in 1989, then head out of the solar system on an endless journey to the stars...
...photograph, transmitted across 1.8 billion miles of emptiness, was taken by the indefatigable traveler Voyager 2 as it approached its Jan. 24 rendezvous with the solar system's seventh planet. On that day, the spacecraft will swoop to within 50,000 miles of Uranus, which last week still looked to Voyager's cameras like a featureless, cloud-covered, blue-green disk. The temporary designation of the new moon, 1985 Ul, seems rather prosaic when compared with Uranus' five other satellites: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. But that should change this summer when the International Astronomical Union meets to assign...
...first big glitch occurred on July 12, when a computer detected contamination in Challenger's hydrogen fuel and aborted the launch 3 sec. before takeoff. The 112-ton spacecraft blasted off 17 days later, but 5 min. 15 sec. into the flight, a monitoring device reported that one of the three main engines seemed to be heating up to a dangerous 1,950 °F. That sensor alerted the onboard computer, and for the first time in the 24-year history of the U.S. manned space, an engine was shut down in flight. But as the craft hobbled bravely heavenward...