Word: spacecrafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mariner IV, the agile U.S. spacecraft designed to take the measure of Mars, has lived up to every expectation. At Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory last week, the last worries vanished; there was no longer any concern that the ship's tape recorder might have gone haywire during part of its historic pass at the red planet. As soon as the eleventh picture came through, JPL monitors knew that all was well. Mariner got all the 21 pictures it went after-plus a bonus: 22 lines of a 22nd picture, which might show the dark edge of Mars...
Trying Harder. From San Diego, Humphrey went to Los Angeles for a California Democratic fund-raising dinner. His speech, while lauding President Johnson, fell admirably short of Jack Valenti's fulsome performance. Next day Humphrey was off to Houston for a two-hour inspection of the Manned Spacecraft Center, then up to Oklahoma City, where he attended the Oklahoma Democratic Party's first $ 100-a-plate dinner (hamburgers and cole slaw) and delivered a ringing, one-hour sermon on the glories of the Great Society. He was back in Washington for only twelve hours before Johnson dispatched...
...only three weeks after Mariner III failed because it could not jettison its protective shroud. A powerful Atlas-Agena rocket lofted the 575-lb. Mariner IV through Earth's atmosphere, then kicked it loose to take off on its own like a great flying windmill. The spacecraft, freed from a cocoon-like covering, unfolded the four solar panels that powered its instruments by converting the sun's energy into electricity. With those panels deployed, it measured 22 ft. 7½ in. across and 9½ ft. to the top of its antenna. Curving into a wide-swinging, elliptical...
...aluminum alloy, carried 138,000 components, including 31,696 delicate electronic components ranging from a computer to a small, lO½-watt radio transmitter. It was programmed and equipped to send to Earth a continuous stream of reports on 39 scientific and 90 engineering measurements. Crowded into the spacecraft were a new type of helium gas magnetometer to study magnetic fields, an ionization chamber and Geiger counter to measure galactic cosmic rays, a collector cup to measure the solar wind's barrage of protons, a cosmic-ray telescope and cosmic-dust collector -plus the all-important TV camera...
...John Casani, 33, Mariner IV's meticulous systems manager, has a reputation among his colleagues as being the man who knows the most about every part of the spacecraft...