Word: vernier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 a tumble that built up to 146 revolutions per minute after repeated but vain attempts to fire the balky engine. As the ship's solar panels...
Cushioning the Jolt. They were, Small vernier rockets near each of the craft's three legs fired to stabilize the spacecraft in a base-down attitude. When the radar sensed that Surveyor was precisely 52 miles above the moon, it fired a powerful, solid-fuel retrorocket that slowed the craft from 5,840 m.p.h. to only 267 m.p.h. in 40 seconds...
...lunar altitude of 25,000 ft., the retrorocket was jettisoned and the vernier rockets took over the job of further reducing speed, stabilizing and gently guiding Surveyor along the proper trajectory toward its impact point. When it was 13 ft. above the lunar surface and descending at 3.3 m.p.h., the 620-lb. Surveyor shut down its verniers and fell the remaining distance. It struck the moon no harder than a parachutist hits the earth. And even this relatively small jolt was cushioned by hydraulic shock absorbers and crushable aluminum pads under Surveyor's legs and body...
Total Record. The novel deals with a Paris high school teacher, Pierre Vernier, who keeps a minute-by-minute log of all that happens in his eleventh-grade geography class in which his nephew Pierre Eller is a student. Vernier is obsessed by the need to record the total experience: This drives him to include, first, accounts of other students and teachers, then of their families and friends, then of their past and future lives. Next, the compulsive Vernier must procure the manuals and textbooks for all the courses these students are taking, to bone up on them...
...order to explore his subjects' secret thoughts, dreams, and whispered classroom exchanges, Vernier extracts information from his colleagues and enrolls his nephew Pierre as a spy. In the first part of Degrees, Vernier writes from his own point of view: he is "I" and Pierre is "you." In the second part, it gradually emerges that things have been reversed: Vernier is "you" and Pierre is "I." But it is not Pierre writing-it is Vernier writing for and as Pierre...