Word: clouded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comet enters the inner part of the solar system, the sun's heat begins to liberate dust and gases from the nucleus, forming a large cloud called the coma. Such clouds may become Jovian in proportions, with a diameter of more than 100,000 miles, though they are very thinly dispersed. In 1969 and 1970, NASA'S Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO-2) discovered that the coma of comets is surrounded by a still larger ball of wispy hydrogen that may far exceed the sun's diameter of 860,000 miles...
...hydrogen cloud is believed to be formed from the dissociation of water molecules in the nucleus. As the comet nears the sun, it acquires its most characteristic feature. Bombarded steadily by the charged particles of the solar wind and by the slight but measurable pressure of sunlight itself, the cometary gases and dust are swept back to form one or more glowing tails. These may reach lengths of 60 million miles or more, roughly two-thirds the distance between earth and sun. Regardless of the direction of the comet's travels, its tail is always directed away from...
...astronauts. From the data gathered by Russia's Venera 7 and 8 landers, America's Mariner 2 and 5 flybys, and radar observations by the Mojave telescope, astronomers can now describe in some detail the hellish surface temperature (900°F.), cratered topography and atmospheric conditions of cloud-shrouded Venus. Using the startlingly good pictures transmitted by Mariner 9, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have just completed a huge model of Mars that shows craters, plains and valleys more clearly than lunar features can be seen through earth-bound telescopes...
...space, the 570-lb. robot gave man his first close-up look at the giant planet Jupiter. After penetrating intense radiation belts that pack radiation dosages at least 1,000 times the level regarded as lethal for humans, Pioneer passed just 81,000 miles above the multicolored Jovian cloud tops, took color pictures, gathered oth er data and then was hurled by the enormous gravitational pull of the sun's larg est planet onto a course that will eventually carry it out of the solar sys tem, toward the stars - the first object from earth ever to embark...
...times stronger than the earth's-follows what the scientists variously dubbed a "Saturn ring" and "Hula-Hoop" model; that is, the lines of magnetic force seem to stretch outward near the equator but are more rounded at the poles. The average temperature of Jupiter's cloud tops is somewhat above 200°F. with no apparent variations on the day and night sides; this fact tends to confirm the widely accepted idea that Jupiter-which is so large that it barely missed generating its own nuclear fires and becoming a star -is giving off some internal heat...