Word: spheres
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When Echo first took to space on Aug. 12, it was as round and polished as a giant ball bearing, its aluminized Mylar film kept tightly inflated by 20 Ibs. of vaporized anthraquinone, a normally solid organic chemical. When its 100-ft. sphere moved on its orbit 1,000 miles away from the surface of the earth, it covered about one-tenth the angle of the planet Venus at 40 million miles, but it did not show as a disk even in a powerful telescope. The sun reflecting on its spherical surface showed as a mathematical point, as stars...
...last. All its gas pressure is probably gone by now. The only reason it keeps its shape is that the forces that tend to shrink or distort it are extremely small. Slater estimates that meteorites nibble away about 1¼ sq. in. of its skin per day. Eventually the sphere may collapse, pushed to a pancake by air drag and pressure of sunlight, or drawn together by the Mylar's "memory" of the way it was folded in the launching rocket. But a flattish or crumpled shape may continue to serve for years as a good radio reflector, which...
...Republicans are definitely responsible for the alltime low prestige of the U.S. in the international sphere. What you really need is a Truman, but since you cannot get him, Kennedy is the only hope...
...ultimate fate of a white dwarf, says Dr. Luyten, is to grow slowly dimmer and smaller. After billions of years, its light will change from white to yellow, then to red. Eventually it will die, and the product will be a black dwarf: a cold sphere of degenerate matter weighing as much as the sun, but smaller than most planets and giving no light...
Cape Canaveral fired a Thor missile with a second-stage Able-Star rocket. Inside a cone atop the Able-Star snuggled the Navy's 223-lb. Transit II-A navigation satellite, a sphere 36 in. in diameter. Transit was the rocket's principal passenger. But with it went a satellite hitchhiker: a 42-lb., 20-in. globe stuffed with instruments to measure solar radiation...