Word: spacecrafts
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...launch went perfectly. The Agena second stage, with Mariner II in its nose, went smoothly into parking orbit. After 16 minutes, its engine fired again, soaring out on a curving course that would lead to Venus. A few minutes later, a cluster of exploding pins popped and the spacecraft spread its, wings into the hard sunlight. All this was reported by telemetry to JPL's 85-ft. dish antenna in South Africa and relayed to the control center at the lab. "We were flying blind during lift-off and injection," says Bill Collier, Assistant Project Manager. "But about...
...scrutinize its target at the end of its long voyage, the spacecraft carried two radiometers, one of them sensitive to radio microwaves, the other to infra-red rays. Each type of radiation behaves differently when passing through clouds or gases; the frequencies were selected to tell as much as possible about the temperature of Venus and the nature of its atmosphere...
...Moons. Although at its closest Mariner was still 21,000 miles away from Venus, a human observer riding the spacecraft would have seen a spectacular sight. Even from 500,000 miles, Venus would be a crescent twice as high as the crescent moon. Because of its high reflectivity and nearness to the sun, it would be much brighter than any moon. As Mariner II swept nearer, its rider would have seen the crescent, growing and thickening, its glare waxing blindingly bright, until it was 35 times the diameter of the full moon as seen from the earth and more than...
...Mariner's reports. They were received as a quavering, singsong radio signal, then translated by a computer into an endless series of letters printed on a broad band of paper. Out of the apparently meaningless melange of characters, Mariner men in JPL's control room deciphered their spacecraft's chatter...
...next interplanetary shot will probably be aimed at Mars, whether or not the Russian spacecraft which was tossed toward Mars on Nov. 1, finally arrives. Since Mars has a nicely transparent atmosphere, the U.S. Mars shot, now scheduled for 1964, will try to take 20 fine-detail pictures during its flyby, store them on tape, and send them slowly and accurately back to Earth. An infrared spectrometer will look for organic compounds whose presence would almost prove the existence of life...