Word: verniers
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...Brittany which initiated me in art and God." And one can judge the intensity of the Nabis' desire for a new sort of pictorial symbolism by seeing Bernard's, Serusier's or Gauguin's Pont-Aven paintings against the more ordinary folklorique images by now forgotten academicians like Emile Vernier or Alfred Guillou. Never before had French art experienced such a plague of nuns and innocent provincial virgins. The trend was neatly parodied by a journalist, Alphonse Allais, who in 1883 exhibited a perfectly blank sheet of white paper with the title First Communion of Anemic Young Girls...
...signal from earth it fired its three vernier engines, rose ten feet from the surface and then landed again, eight feet from its original site. It was the first rocket-powered takeoff from the face of the moon...
Testing a Duplicate. Immediately after the short corrective burst from Surveyor's three small vernier rockets, telemetry from the spacecraft showed that helium gas, used to pressurize both the vernier fuel and oxidizer, had begun leaking through a valve that had remained partially open. At the rate that helium was being lost, controllers feared there would not be enough pressure left to operate the engines during the final descent to the moon. The result would be a fatal crash landing...
Others kept working. Using computers, engineers calculated the rate at which the helium leak would decrease as pressure dropped. At Hughes Aircraft (Surveyor's designer and builder) and at a JPL test site, propulsion experts hurriedly put duplicate vernier engines through tests to determine their performance with low helium pressures. Feeding the results into computers, JPL scientists took less than 40 hours to work out a new and complex lunar landing sequence...
Then they put it to the crucial test of action. First they fired Surveyor's vernier engines for 33 seconds to consume more fuel and reduce the craft's landing weight. New instructions were radioed to Surveyor's memory bank and programmed into ground-based computers. As a result, the craft's main retrorocket began firing at a height of 26 miles above the lunar surface, instead of the originally planned 52 miles. It shut off at an altitude of only 4,400 ft., instead of 40,000 ft., after braking Surveyor...