Word: thousandths
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Only at rare intervals, though, did Explorer XVI collide with anything bigger than a microscopic bit of cosmic dust. There were 44 meteoroids that succeeded in penetrating a sheet of beryllium-copper one-thousandth of an inch thick, which is slightly thicker than household aluminum foil. The most powerful meteoroid encountered knocked a tiny hole in stainless steel three-thousandths of an inch thick. Metal as thick as the wall of a beer can went unpunctured. NASA's tentative conclusion is that the plentiful meteoroids are too small to do harm, and the dangerous ones...
...Microtomes that work like miniature bacon slicers on a piece of tissue no bigger than the tip of a baby's pinkie and cut it into slivers each less than one twenty-five-thousandth of an inch thick...
Government buyers, insistent on the nearest thing to perfection in space components, have been the prime driving force behind industry's growing interest in nondestructive testing. Ever since loose solder balls of only a thousandth of an inch in diameter were found inside transistors in the Polaris missile, the Air Force has insisted that all the transistors in missile components be Xrayed. Companies have discovered that "preventive" testing produces safer and more efficient products, and also cuts costs by making it easier to detect and correct flaws. Manufacturers of machinery and airframes spend 13% of their production costs...
...that the nearer ones cover the shadows that they cast on others. Cook and Franklin measured the rate of brightening with precise modern instruments and decided that about one-twentieth of the rings' volume is filled with particles of ice-fog that are about one one-thousandth of an inch in diameter. Only if they are arranged in a sheet less than 8 in. thick will those tiny bits of ice cover one another's shadows just enough to cause the rings' sudden brightening...
...deceptively simple decisions: to make nothing but electronic measuring instruments, and to insist on rigid standards of quality. At Hewlett-Packard, specialization is only relative. The company's catalogue lists more than 900 devices designed for such esoteric tasks as timing electrical impulses that last only one-thousandth of a millionth of a second. The surge in the company's 1962 sales was not because any single product was a bestseller, but because H.-P.'s fertile research department turned out so many new products to sell. Rangy (6 ft. 5 in.) Dave Packard and compact...