Word: watt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Across the Atlantic in Britain, a young (34) American electronics expert, Bill Young, sat in a gadget-packed trailer parked near Jodrell Bank's giant radio telescope. The 250-ft. dish picked up the "woo-woo" signal from Pioneer V's 5-watt transmitter on schedule and swung slowly to track it through the sky. Bill Young listened. Twenty-seven minutes after the launch, when the rocket was about 5,000 miles above the earth's surface, he pressed a button that sent a radio impulse to the telescope's big dish, and from there...
Five Months Away. As Pioneer V curved toward the sun, the 5-watt transmitter performed perfectly, delivering reports from its sensing instruments: two radiation counters, a magnetometer to feel for magnetic fields in space and a device to count micrometeorites. When Pioneer V recedes a few million miles from the earth, a 150-watt transmitter will take over. NASA scientists estimate that Jodrell Bank will be able to hear Pioneer V 50 million miles away. It will reach the limit of this range in about five months...
...other space probes, one U.S. and the other Russian, have gone into solar orbits, but their radios went dead a few hundred thousand miles from the earth. Pioneer V's 150-watt transmitter is designed to work indefinitely. It will accumulate information in a recording device, send it in a five-minute burst, and then rest for five hours while the solar cells recharge its batteries. NASA scientists hope that it will still be transmitting in 1963 when Pioneer V will overtake the earth and again come within the 50 million-mile range...
...vacuum tube, but most of the rest of the circuitry was still needed. Last week Westinghouse Electric Corp. showed an entire milliwatt amplifier, circuitry and all, contained in a single block of germanium hardly bigger (one-thousandth of a cubic inch) than the head of a pin. A 5-watt amplifier is about the size of a dime...