Word: meteoroids
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...range of other moon samples that have been brought back to earth. How could scientists have been so far off the mark in their first estimates? Conceding that it was all a "big surprise," Schaeffer theorized that the long-buried soil might have been dug up recently by a meteoroid impact, thus giving it a fresh look...
...results back to mission controllers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. A complex array of detectors, which poke out of the cone-shaped spacecraft like antennae on a monstrous insect, will measure, among other things, magnetic fields, ultraviolet and infrared radiation, cosmic rays, meteoroid density and the intensity of the solar wind (charged atomic particles streaming from...
...Martian atmosphere. JPL technicians explained that the spectrometer, which should be cooled to below - 400° F. to operate efficiently, refused to chill at all. Mariner 7 caused even greater concern at Mission Control when it went off the air entirely for seven hours. Apparently struck by a tiny meteoroid, the spacecraft lost its fix on the star Canopus and its directional antenna spun away from earth. A new roll-and-search command went up from Pasadena. Mariner 7 obeyed, and though performing at less than capacity, its radio functioned again...
...phase of earthly life has profited more than medicine. By adapting the compact electronic equipment designed to monitor the life functions of space travelers, doctors are now able to watch a wardful of seriously ill patients from afar. By modifying a meteoroid sensor, they can detect minute body tremors caused by such neurological disorders as Parkinson's disease. Another adaptation involves the so-called "sign switch": intended to be actuated by the mere movement of an astronaut's eyes so that his hands will be free, it has already been installed in a motorized wheelchair for paraplegics...
...whiskers sprout from both ends of the break. In a few days, the whiskers can bridge a gap one millimeter wide (about one twenty-fifth of an inch) and carry one watt of electrical power-enough for most of the delicate circuitry in modern spacecraft. Collision with a sizable meteoroid might result in damage too extensive for whisker therapy, admits Minneapolis-Honeywell Physicist William Jarnagin, who led the team that developed the alloy. But that hardly matters, he adds somberly. "Everything would go then...