Word: impactions
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...series of pictures that Ranger sent home from its final dive began with a view of the Crater Alphonsus and its neighbors, a picture that just about matched the best that have been taken by the biggest telescopes on earth. Then, as the spacecraft plunged toward its impact point, the lunar landscape expanded. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the field of view narrowed (see cuts), and details emerged that had never before been glimpsed by human eyes...
...nearly 6,000 m.p.h. Its cameras never faltered. They sent their pictures to the end, giving countless millions of televiewers a look at the crater floor as it might be seen from the cockpit of a spacecraft about to land. The last pictures were transmitted just .45 seconds before impact from three-quarters of a mile above the lunar surface. They showed objects as small as ten inches...
...they intended to do much better than that. When the spacecraft was 175,000 miles from the earth, they sent it radioed orders to fire a small rocket in a specified direction for 31 seconds. Soon their computers had calculated Ranger's new course and predicted that impact would be within a few miles of the desired point...
Staggering Capacity. The most impressive fact about the age of the computer is how young it still is-and how little society has yet felt the full impact of the computer's potential. In the years to come, computers will be able to converse with men, will themselves run supermarkets and laboratories, will help to find cures for man's diseases, and will automatically translate foreign languages on worldwide TV relayed by satellite. Optical scanning devices, already in operation in some companies, will eventually enable computers to gobble up all kinds of information visually. The machines will then...
...When these new machines realize their potential," says John Diebold, chairman of the Diebold Group, Inc., consultants in the computer field, "there will be a social effect of unbelievable proportions. This impact on society is still to come." Computermen have even been advised to get their machines out to "see life" in that society by setting up communications links between them and other computers in dispersed locations. Says R. M. Bloch, a vice president of Honeywell: "The computer that lacks an ability to communicate with the outside world is in danger of remaining an isolated marvel mumbling to itself...