Word: surveyor
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NASA's $350 million Surveyor program has already tested the bearing strength of the lunar surface and scouted all the proposed flatland target sites for the U.S.'s first manned moon mission. This was accomplished spectacularly in four out of six shots; Surveyor's budget authorized seven. What to do with the last moon robot? As a sort of job-end bonus for a mission brilliantly accomplished, NASA left it up to a panel of lunar experts. They decided to gamble on an exploratory shot to one of the moon's unknown upland regions: the rock...
Even with luck, mission controllers at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory gave themselves only a 40% chance of a successful landing. If one of Surveyor 7's three feet landed on a high rock, the craft would tip over, rendering its cameras and testing equipment useless. Or the feet might straddle a rock, which would then smash into the spacecraft's delicate underbelly. In an almost shoot-the-works mood, therefore, Surveyor 7's controllers fired the retrorockets at the end of the 66-hour, 225,000-mile journey last week. The craft obediently braked from...
...rites of passage. In agrarian societies, a hard-working farmer's son rapidly becomes a certified adult. Until recently, puberty occurred at about 14 or 15, marriage two or three years later. The word "teenager" was inconceivable for such 17-year-old adults as Joan of Arc or Surveyor George Washington. In the 18th century, many upper-class Englishmen impressively taught their eldest sons at home; in stressing adult concerns as well as academics, they took Locke's advice: "The sooner you treat him as a man, the sooner he will...
Although NASA has ordered no additional Surveyors, Hughes scientists believe that the reliable little craft would be ideal for further lunar exploring-even for a trip to Mars. Properly modified, they say, Surveyor could land gently on Mars and return pictures and data for only ¼ to ⅓ the cost of the planned Voyager spacecraft...
...Caltech's Lee DuBridge watch next to nothing. Milton Eisenhower, nominated to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this month, sees news, sports and, at times, movies and specials. Physicist William Pickering, whose Jet Propulsion Laboratory has directed U.S. unmanned space probes from Explorer 1 to Surveyor 6, likes a preposterous piece of space fiction, Star Trek. J. Edgar Hoover is strictly business: No. 1 on his most wanted list is The F.B.I...