Word: thruster
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First there were two small red flashes in the starry sky above California's Mojave Desert, as the space shuttle Challenger fired thruster rockets to steady its attitude. Then, after a wait of about three minutes, ground observers glimpsed the unlighted shuttle. Silently it glided into view just 200 ft. above the end of runway 22. In the glare of blue xenon searchlights, Navy Captain Richard Truly, the mission commander, flawlessly guided the orbiter, nose up, to its first nighttime landing. Challenger's arrival at Edwards Air Force Base last week, at 12:40 a.m. California time, ended...
...unmanned Cosmos satellite and then in June with the manned Soyuz T-9 capsule to form a single orbiting complex. The linking of the Cosmos with Salyut 7 has doubled the amount of working space available to cosmonauts aboard the space station. In addition, the latest Cosmos has thruster jets that enable it to change the orbit of the whole complex, leading TASS to dub it a "space tugboat." It also has a bell-shaped descent module, a detachable section that can ferry materials and experiments back to earth-something that the Soviets previously could not do with the cramped...
Columbia emerged from its radio blackout nearly 30 miles off course and some 3,000 ft. lower than the flight plan called for. But Engle and Truly found the ship surprisingly aerodynamic, even without an engine. With only occasional assists from their little thruster rockets, they were able to get it quickly back on course. Such responsiveness certainly delights Chris Kraft. Says he: "We gained a great deal more confidence in the flying capability of this machine. We're beginning to prove our belief that it will perform as advertised...
...body is 12 ft. in diameter. At 825 kg (1,820 lbs.), the whole machine weighs less than a Ford Escort. It moves through frictionless space effortlessly from its initial thrust, sometimes affected by the gravitational pull of planets, but able to correct its course with blasts from small thruster rockets. The most complex cluster of equipment is housed forward near its two TV cameras, and includes an infrared radiometer that measures the heat of planets and spectrometers to analyze composition of the atmosphere. The magnetometers for locating and measuring magnetic fields are carried on the opposite side...
...robot swept around Jupiter itself, coming within 404,000 miles of the cloud tops, the J.P.L. controllers fired Voyager 2's small thruster engines for 76 minutes, a "slow burn" that changed its speed slightly. Thus, after sailing by its next target, Saturn, in August 1981, Voyager 2 will continue on to Uranus, more than 1.6 billion miles from earth. It will reach Uranus 4½ years later, in January 1986. Leaving Jupiter, Voyager took an edge-on look at the planet's ring, which emerged on J.P.L. TV screens as a glow-'ng white neon-like...