In Greek mythology, Chiron was held to be the superlative centaur amongst his brethren, as he was called as the "wisest and justest of all the centaurs".
Centaurs are small Solar System bodies with a semi-major axis between those of the outer planets. They generally have unstable orbits because they cross or have crossed the orbits of one or more of the giant planets; almost all their orbits have dynamic lifetimes of only a few million years, but there is one centaur, (514107) 2015 BZ509, which may be in a stable orbit. Centaurs typically behave with characteristics of both asteroids and comets. They are named after the mythological centaurs that were a mixture of horse and human. It has been estimated that there are around 44,000 centaurs in the Solar System with diameters larger than 1 kilometer.
The Saturn family of American rocket boosters was developed by a team of mostly German rocket scientists led by Wernher von Braun to launch heavy payloads to Earth orbit and beyond. Originally proposed as a military satellite launcher, they were adopted as the launch vehicles for the Apollo moon program. Three versions were built and flown: Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V.
Tholins are a wide variety of organic compounds formed by solar ultraviolet irradiation or cosmic rays from simple carbon-containing compounds such as carbon dioxide, methane or ethane, often in combination with nitrogen or water. Tholins are disordered polymer-like materials made of repeating chains of linked subunits and complex combinations of functional groups. Tholins do not form naturally on modern-day Earth, but they are found in great abundance on the surface of icy bodies in the outer Solar System, and as reddish aerosols in the atmosphere of outer Solar System planets and moons.
The Saturn I was the United States' first heavy-lift dedicated space launcher, a rocket designed specifically to launch large payloads into low Earth orbit. Most of the rocket's power came from a clustered lower stage consisting of tanks taken from older rocket designs strapped together to make a single large booster, leading critics to jokingly refer to it as "Cluster's Last Stand".
The Titan IV family of rockets were used by the U.S. Air Force. They were launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. At the time of its introduction, the Titan IV was the "largest unmanned space booster used by the Air Force."
The outer planets are those planets in the Solar System beyond the asteroid belt, and hence refers to the gas giants and ice giants, which are in order of their distance from the Sun:
Milstar is a constellation of military communications satellites in geostationary orbit, which are operated by the United States Air Force, and provide secure and jam-resistant worldwide communications to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces of the United States. Six spacecraft were launched between 1994 and 2003, of which five are operational; the third launch failed, both damaging the satellite and leaving it in an unusable orbit.
The Saturn Vehicle Evaluation Committee, better known as the Silverstein Committee, was a US government commission assembled in 1959 to recommend specific directions that NASA could take with the Saturn rocket program. The committee was chaired by Abe Silverstein, a long-time NASA engineer, with the express intent of selecting upper stages for the Saturn after a disagreement broke out between the Air Force and Army over its development. During the meetings the Committee members outlined a number of different potential designs, including the low-risk solution von Braun was developing with existing ICBM airframes, as well as versions using entirely new upper stages developed to take full advantage of the booster stage. The advantages of using new uppers were so great that the committee won over an initially skeptical von Braun, and the future of the Saturn program changed forever.
The Atlas-Centaur was an American expendable launch system derived from the SM-65 Atlas D missile. Launches were conducted from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Sphinx is the designation of an American test satellite. The Sphinx satellite was the payload for the first Titan IIIE Centaur rocket. The Helios, Viking and Voyager space probes were later launched using this rocket.
Chiron is the name given to a supposed moon of Saturn sighted by Hermann Goldschmidt in 1861. It has since been determined that no such moon exists.
The Inertial Upper Stage (IUS), originally designated the Interim Upper Stage, was a two-stage solid-fueled rocket upper stage developed by Boeing for the United States Air Force beginning in 1976 for raising payloads from low Earth orbit to higher orbits or interplanetary trajectories following launch aboard a Titan 34D or Titan IV rocket, or from the payload bay of the Space Shuttle.
Studied in 1959, the Saturn B-1, was a four-stage concept rocket similar to the Jupiter-C, and consisted of a Saturn IB first stage, a cluster of four Titan I first stages used for a second stage, a S-IV third stage and a Centaur high-energy liquid-fueled fourth stage. Like its proposed predecessors, the Saturn B-1 never flew and neither did the Titan cluster stage. The S-IV however flew on the Saturn I.
In late poetical Greek mythology, ichthyocentaurs, were a race of centaurine sea gods with the upper body of a human, the lower front of a horse, the tail of a fish, and lobster-claw horns on their heads. The best-known members of this race were Aphros and Bythos, two half-brothers of the wise centaur Chiron and the sons of the Titan Cronus and Nymph Philyra. Though little remembered, they were set in the sky as the astronomical constellation Pisces.
Transtage, given the United States Air Force designation SSB-10A, was an American upper stage used on Titan III rockets, developed by Martin Marietta and Aerojet.
The Titan IIIE or Titan 3E, also known as the Titan III-Centaur, was an American expendable launch system. Launched seven times between 1974 and 1977, it enabled several high-profile NASA missions, including the Voyager and Viking planetary probes and the joint West Germany-U.S. Helios spacecraft. All seven launches were conducted from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 41 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
