The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

88 Copernicus Observatory
longest Mercury orbital mission and spent eight days in
space aboard Gemini 5. He earned a B.S. in aeronautical
engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology in
1956. Having received an Army commission, he transferred
to the Air Force and flew F-84 and F-86 jets in Germany
for four years. Back in the United States he
received his degree and then attended the Air Force
Experimental Flight Test School at Edwards Air Force
Base before being assigned as an aeronautical engineer
and test pilot in the Performance Engineering Branch of
the Flight Test Division at Edwards. In 1959, he was
selected by NASA and on May 15–16, 1963, piloted his
Faith 7 capsule on the sixth and final Mercury Project
mission. Electrical problems near the end of the mission
meant he had to manually fire his retrorockets and steer
the capsule through reentry. Problems also beset Cooper
on his next flight, a then-record eight-day trip aboard
Gemini 5 in August 1965. Trouble with fuel supplies,
power systems, and a computer-generated command led
Gemini 5 to land 166 km short of its designated target.
Cooper retired from NASA and the Air Force in 1970,
and has since been involved in technical research with
several companies. 60
Copernicus Observatory
See OAO-3 (Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 3).
Coriolis
A test mission for the U.S. Air Force that carries two scientific
payloads: Wind, and the Solar Mass Ejection
Imager (SMEI). Wind is a Navy experiment built by the
Naval Research Laboratory to passively measure ocean
surface wind directions, while SMEI is an Air Force
Research Laboratory experiment to observe coronal mass
ejections in visible light. The spacecraft’s two payloads
will collect data continuously during a three-year mission.
Launch was scheduled for January 2003 from Vandenberg
Air Force Base by a Titan II rocket into a circular
830 km × 98.7° orbit.
Coriolis effect
The deflection of the flight path of a spacecraft caused by
Earth’s rotation. Over the northern hemisphere, the deviation
is to the right; over the southern hemisphere, it is
to the left.
corona
The outermost layer of the Sun’s (or some other star’s)
atmosphere, visible to the eye during a total solar eclipse;
it can also be observed through special filters and, best of
all, by X-ray cameras aboard satellites. The corona is very
hot—up to 1.5 million degrees Celsius—and is the source
of the solar wind.
Corona
America’s first series of photo-reconnaissance or IMINT
(imagery intelligence) satellites, involving more than one
hundred launches between 1959 and 1972. The program
had the cover name Discoverer and was only declassified
in 1995. A Discoverer satellite would be placed in a polar
orbit by a Thor-Agena rocket in order to take photographic
swaths as it passed over the Soviet Union. It then
collected its exposed film in a heat-resistant “bucket” at
the nose, and the bucket would reenter over the Pacific
Ocean, deploy two small parachutes, and be recovered in
midair by an aircraft towing a trapeze-like snare. Bizarre as
this sounds, the program proved successful after a shaky
start—the first 12 launches failed, and the thirteenth,
though achieving orbit, did not carry a camera. Discoverer
14 marked the program’s first triumph. Its returning
bucket was caught by a C-119 cargo plane on August 18,
1960, and provided the earliest photos of the Soviet
Union’s Plesetsk rocket base. In that single day, Corona
yielded more valuable images of the Soviet Union than
did the entire U-2 spy plane program. It proved conclusively
that the Soviets’ intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM) arsenal did not number in the hundreds, as was
widely feared, but rather amounted to somewhere
between 25 and 50. This knowledge, however, was hidden
from the American public for years. Corona showed that
the supposed missile gap that Kennedy played upon in his
presidential campaign was a myth—a fact he would have
learned at the time had he taken up Eisenhower’s offer of
intelligence briefings. Corona allowed the U.S. intelligence
community to catalog Soviet air defense and
antiballistic missile sites, nuclear weapons–related facilities,
and submarine bases, along with military installations
in China and Eastern Europe. It also provided pictures of
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and Soviet arms control compliance.
Its retrieval system helped NASA develop a safe
means of recovering manned spacecraft, and its imaging
systems provided the basis for the cameras carried by the
Lunar Orbiters in 1966 and 1967. 74
Coronas
An international project to study the Sun and its interaction
with Earth using spacecraft launched by Russia and
carrying experiments developed by Russia and Ukraine
with involvement from scientists in other European
countries and the United States. Coronas satellites are
equipped to study solar activity including flares, active
regions, and mass ejections, in various regions of the
spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays. Coronas-I
reentered the atmosphere on March 4, 2001, two days
before Mir was de-orbited, leaving Russia temporarily
without a single working science payload in orbit.
Coronas-F carries three main groups of instruments to