Word: caltech
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...When Caltech Astronomer Charles Kowal first examined the photographic plate that he had exposed atop Mount Palomar last month, he was openly skeptical. At the edge of the small, irregular galaxy that he was studying in the constellation Centaurus, he saw a large burst of light brighter than the entire galaxy itself that had not been there before. Had a stray asteroid wandered into the telescope's field of view? Closer inspection quickly revealed that the light came not from a nearby asteroid, but from a far more awesome heavenly phenomenon: a supernova, the explosive death of a giant...
Russian Failure. These dramatic findings have come from the extraordinarily productive Mariner 9 spacecraft. Still alive and transmitting, the 1,200-lb. robot has sent back more than 6,800 pictures since it began circling the planet last November. By patiently matching and assembling these photographs, scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have put together a jigsaw-puzzle-like map of a strip of Mars extending 30° above and below the equator as well as an overall view of its south polar cap. Indeed, detailed photographs, showing features as small as 100 yards across, were among...
...birth some 4.6 billion years ago; 2) a layer that was melted and then hardened after the great asteroid impacts that created such large features as the Sea of Rains nearly a billion years later; and 3) more recent lava flows, possibly produced by the eruption of volcanoes. Explains Caltech Geologist Eugene Shoemaker: "The geology of the lunar highlands is incredibly difficult and complex, far more so than the earth...
...Burbidge received a Carnegie fellowship in astronomy at Mount Wilson Observatory, but since these awards were not then available to women, Mrs. Burbidge had to take a job as a researcher at nearby Caltech. There was also a more serious problem. As a woman, Mrs. Burbidge found that she could get precious observing time at Mount Wilson Observatory only if her husband applied for it and she pretended to act as his assistant. Recalls Mrs. Burbidge: "It was my first exposure to the discouragement women scientists encounter...
...planet's northern polar cap under a thin layer of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. That hidden water, he says, may be released periodically into the Martian atmosphere, producing regional rains and perhaps floods to erode the arid Martian surface. Bemused scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab are now calling Smith's rains Martian "monsoons...