Word: thruster
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...crew got busy. Settling Apollo 8 into orbit around the moon was a high-wire maneuver that involved turning the ship backward and firing its powerful service propulsion engine for precisely four and a half minutes - an eternity in a business in which barely a breath from a thruster is enough to set a ship spinning off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down just enough to ease it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the moon instead. Orbital mechanics also demanded that the maneuver occur on the dark...
...Antenna ? Heat shield ? Thruster ? Star tracking cameras ? PEPSSI - Detects molecules escaping from Pluto's atmosphere ? SWAP - Looks for magnetic fields and measures how fast the atmosphere is escaping ? RTG - Powers the craft with a tiny amount of plutonium. Because the probe will travel so far from the sun, solar power was not an option ? LORRI - A high-resolution telescope and camera capable of detecting features about the size of a football field ? REX - Uses radio waves to analyze the atmosphere and determine night-side temperature ? ALICE - Analyzes ultraviolet light to determine...
...retirement to compete, bulking up with an old sumo trick: eat chanko nabe, a rich stew, then promptly go to sleep. But size ultimately matters less than technique--there are 70 moves a wrestler can use to get his opponent out of the ring. "I'm a pusher, a thruster," says Kaleo, who fights for Japan. "I come out like a boo rush." An all-American sumo to watch is Yale graduate and math teacher Kena Heffernan. "He's a very exciting wrestler but not that big," says Yonezuka. "Only...
...rovers currently rolling across Mars may never have made it to the surface if someone who saw the plans had not begun fretting about the Martian winds the ships would encounter and argued for additional thrusters to counteract them. The thrusters were added, and the design change made all the difference. More recently, the lab was planning the less publicized Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)--a twin-satellite pas de deux designed to measure Earth's gravitational field and its effect on ocean currents. A critical step was eliminating any wobble between the ships. J.P.L. staff members had been...
...solar panels and restore power to the rest of the station. Should this fail and Mir's systems collapse completely, the crew could abandon ship in a Soyuz spacecraft docked outside, though they've already had to plunder a bit of the escape pod's precious thruster fuel to keep the station stable...