Word: orbitally
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the Kennedy Space Center and the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome, powerful shuttles and unmanned rockets lift off week after week, bearing construction modules and fuel supplies to a giant space station in earth orbit. There, skilled workers have been assembling the ship that will take the first humans to Mars. After more than a year of construction, the million- pound, ungainly looking spacecraft is ready. With a crew of eight, it separates from the space station and heads for Mars, following the Hohmann ellipse, a space trajectory that may one day be as familiar as a great-circle...
Stifled by budget cuts and foundering without clear-cut goals, NASA has scheduled only one Mars probe, the Mars Observer, which will go into orbit around the planet in 1993 to collect data on climate and geology. And while President Reagan agreed at the recent Moscow summit to a cautious joint communique describing "scientific missions to the moon and Mars" as "areas of possible bilateral and international cooperation," the Administration has been at best lukewarm to the concept of exploring Mars, jointly or otherwise...
When Mariner 9 was successfully inserted into low orbit around Mars in 1971, a planet-wide dust storm obscured its vision for six weeks. After the dust settled, Mariner's cameras revealed a fascinating landscape: towering volcanoes, great canyons, lava flows and a multitude of craters in the red- hued plains. What excited scientists and Mars buffs the most, however, was the unmistakable traces of dry riverbeds and deltas etched into the rock, evidence that water had once flowed freely on the Martian surface. Had life evolved on Mars while water was still ample? And might living organisms still exist...
That is just what the Soviets plan to do. In 1992, when America's Mars Observer is scheduled to fly, they hope to send a third Phobos spacecraft into Mars orbit carrying advanced remote-sensing devices, including a radar mapper that will seek out the best landing sites for future missions. Two years later, the Soviets intend to launch a pair of highly sophisticated landers to Mars. Each will carry a small computer-controlled surface rover, a six-wheeled vehicle capable of traveling as far as 60 miles from the lander. It will be equipped with TV cameras, scoops...
...eyes, would seek out appropriate rock samples and stow them in a craft designed to return them to earth for analysis. At NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., experts are designing living quarters for the space station that the U.S. hopes to begin assembling in earth orbit in the mid-1990s. Plans call for private sleeping cubicles, each equipped with a TV, sound systems and a computer. Mars enthusiasts point out that approval of a manned Mars mission as a goal would finally provide a compelling rationale for the projected $30 billion space station that NASA...