Word: surveyor
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Because It's There. Surveyor I and Lunar Orbiter II have illumined the moon as being little more than an ugly grey rock pile. So why send a man to see for himself? The geologist wants it done because he hopes to find clues to when and how the earth came to be. The biologist wants to know if there are any vestiges of existence there that might solve the riddle of what life really is. The astronomer hopes that a definitive look at the moon could help unlock the secret of how the solar system was formed...
...sore point is called Palena by the Chileans and Rio Encuentro by the Argentines. It consists of 260 mountainous square miles inhabited by wind-battered trees, 240 people and a few head of hardy livestock - in short, precious little and little precious. But because of a surveyor's faulty maps, the arbitrated border was inexactly placed, and regardless of the land's lack of value, both countries heatedly denounced the boundary. For years objections flew back and forth, but it was all fairly harmless until 1963, when Argentine gendarmes suddenly strung up a barbed-wire fence where they...
...built-in darkroom aided Orbiter's remarkable performance. Unlike Ranger spacecraft, or the Surveyor that made a soft landing and televised relatively coarse pictures directly to earth, Orbiter focused the images from its medium and high-resolution lenses onto a fine-grain strip of film. After each section of the film was exposed, it was passed over a drum and pressed against a web treated with chemicals that developed it. After drying, the negative was scanned electronically, one narrow (one-tenth of an inch) strip at a time. Because each strip was electronically divided into 17,000 horizontal lines...
...ending for a flight that had made an impressive start. Launched by an Atlas Centaur rocket less than a second before its time "window" closed, Surveyor headed toward the moon on a near-perfect trajectory that would have set it down just 40 miles from its intended target in Central Bay. Their hopes buoyed, scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory planned a minor mid-course correction and ordered Surveyor's three small vernier engines to fire briefly. Two of the engines performed obediently, but the third refused to work. The resulting unbalanced thrust threw Surveyor into...
Aware that Surveyor was dying in space, scientists decided to salvage some engineering telemetry data from the mission. They turned on the craft's landing radar system to check the effect of failing batteries on its operation, then they opened the vents on the liquid helium tanks to test the system that pressurizes Surveyor's rocket fuel. In a last effort, they fired the spacecraft's big retrorocket while it was still 70,000 miles from the moon. The spin rate slowed, but not nearly enough. Then, while the retrorocket was firing, all contact was lost with...