Word: target
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...surgical precision necessary to hit only certain targets in the North Vietnamese cities, Navy pilots recently began using a new, superaccurate torpedo-shaped missile that is called "the Walleye" (after the various species of fish, particularly the American pike, that have protruding eyes). The bomb's eye is a television camera in the nose of the warhead. To fire the Walleye, the pilot points the bomb at the intended target until the camera has locked onto the object, which must be bright and distinct enough to stand out from the surroundings. Then, as the missile is released and glides...
...correction it could have hit the moon within 26 miles of its intended landing site-one of the most accurate launches achieved by the U.S. space program. But controllers at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, aiming for perfection, ordered a delicate midcourse maneuver to place Surveyor directly on target. It was then that the entire mission came close to disaster...
Delightful Half Life. Because the most recently discovered transuranium elements decompose quickly, the scientists hurriedly analyzed the einsteinium target after the bombardment. To their surprise, they discovered a minute amount-fewer than 30,000 atoms-of a mysterious and heavy isotope, which they later identified as mendelevium 258. Even stranger, the isotope-unlike many of its transuranium counterparts -appeared to be in no rush to disappear. The California scientists eventually determined that its half life (the time in which half the atoms of an element decay) was nearly two months. This compared, for example, with only eight seconds for lawrencium...
...nucleus, certain kinds of decay are hindered." Whatever the reason, scientists are delighted. The long half life will enable them eventually to accumulate more substantial amounts of the new isotope and to study its properties at leisure. Even more important, mendelevium stays around long enough to make a good target for high-velocity particle accelerators. And it is by the bombardment of uranium and transuranium elements that even heavier elements and their isotopes have been created...
...second of two projects on which the company had been pinning its hopes for re-entry into the commercial airframe business, a field that it left (except for business jets) in 1962, when it rolled out the last of 170 turboprop Electras. The No. 1 target was the Government-supported program to build a U.S. supersonic transport. When its SST hopes crashed last...