Word: cosmically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Choked Tubes. Less reassuring news came from a team of cosmic ray experts at the State University of Iowa headed by Dr. James A. Van Allen. Both Explorer I and Explorer III, said Van Allen, ran into a belt of intense radiation at about 600 miles elevation. Each of the satellites carries a single Geiger tube to count cosmic rays. The radio transmitter of Explorer I sends a signal whenever the tube has made 128 counts. Explorer III has a magnetic tape that records the tube's counts during each circuit of the earth and reports to a ground...
When the Explorers' orbits were carrying them near the earth, they both reported reasonable numbers of cosmic rays, around 30 per second, but as they climbed up toward their apogees the count came faster. At 1,100 kilometers (684 miles) the tubes registered as high as 140 counts per second. Then a strange thing happened. As the satellites climbed even higher, the transmitters reported no rays at all. During orbit after orbit the counter of Explorer III was silent for 15 minutes. When the satellites swung down again to lower levels, they resumed reporting reasonable numbers of cosmic rays...
...newest satellite, Explorer III, was similar to Explorer I, fired Jan. 31, and identical to Explorer II, which miscarried and disappeared after its successful launching March 5. Explorer III, weighing 31 Ibs., carried a special tape recorder that would enable scientists to measure cosmic rays more efficiently (see SCIENCE). As it turned out. its orbit, coursing an ellipse from 110 miles at its perigee to 1,735 miles at apogee at a top speed of 18,850 m.p.h.. was less than Army scientists had hoped for-and as much as 700 miles inside the Navy's grapefruit-sized...
Your Science article "Life on a Billion Planets" [March 3], is plain horse sense. Who the hell are we (on this planet) to believe we are the only humans in all the cosmic world? Astronomer Struve says: "It is perfectly conceivable that some intelligent race meddled once too often with nuclear laws and blew themselves to bits." This is just about what may hit us-if we keep monkeying around with nuclear fission...
...great dinosaurs of 100 million years ago probably reproduced slowly, as big modern animals do. So the Soviet scientists suggest that a few centuries of intense cosmic rays from an exploding star may have killed them off. Small, fast-breeding animals, such as the primitive, ratlike mammals of the time, would not be damaged as much. So the mammals survived the siege of cosmic rays. After the supernova had died down, some evolved into forms almost as big as the dinosaurs...