Word: spacecrafts
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Just getting Pathfinder from Cape Canaveral to Ares Vallis required a remarkable bit of cosmic sharpshooting. Mars is only 4,200 miles across--about half as big as Earth--and the floodplain NASA was aiming for is only 60 miles wide. The barest flutter in the spacecraft's trajectory could have caused Pathfinder to swing far wide of its destination. To prevent the ship from straying too far from its ideal path, the flight plan included five different opportunities for midcourse corrections during which the spacecraft's thrusters could be fired to refine the trajectory. Over the course...
...mission control, the engineers seated at consoles leaned forward, looking for the telemetry numbers that would indicate that the ship was indeed decelerating as it should. Support engineers stood behind them, squinting at the screens. At his console, chief engineer Rob Manning scanned the numbers flowing back from space. "Spacecraft is now slowing down very rapidly," he said reassuringly...
...ship indicated that landing conditions were well within what the engineers had expected. Pathfinder was tilted at an angle of less than 3[degrees], plenty flat enough to allow the rover to disembark. The solar arrays were being bathed by sun and were producing all the power the spacecraft needed. That same sun, however, was providing little heat: the temperature at Ares Vallis was a crisp -64[degrees]F. But Pathfinder, built to function in that kind of killing cold, seemed unaffected. "I'm ecstatic," said flight systems manager Brian Muirhead as the stream of healthy signals poured into J.P.L...
What was perhaps most remarkable about the spacecraft that set up shop in Ares Vallis late last week is how unremarkable they are. NASA's early interplanetary spacecraft--the Vikings, the Pioneers, the Voyagers--were limousine ships packed with dozens of scientific instruments and countless backup systems. On the surface, of course, this made sense. "If you've never been to Jupiter or Saturn before," says Golombek, "you want a whole bunch of instruments to cover the sphere of what you want to know...
...covering the sphere can get pricey. In 1993, before NASA's Mars Observer spacecraft had even entered orbit around the planet, it blew an aneurysm in a fuel line and spun off into the void, taking nearly $1 billion of NASA funding with it. The twin Viking spacecraft, which accomplished their missions successfully, landing on Mars in 1976, nonetheless set taxpayers back about $3 billion...