Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...each coop are four disks, each one meter across and wrapped in black plastic. From the disks, cables run to a central building crammed with oscilloscopes and other delicate gear. Last week the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, institutional proprietor of all this apparatus, announced that it has detected a cosmic ray (high-speed particle) that came to the earth from a foreign galaxy millions of light years away in the far depths of space. This was eye-opening scientific news...
...Cosmic rays have long been a fascinating and controversial subject among scientists. It is generally agreed that most low-speed cosmic rays are particles shot out of the sun, but that those with higher energy must come from somewhere else. The late Enrico Fermi thought they came from interstellar magnetic fields which gradually speed up protons and other charged particles moving between the stars of the Milky Way galaxy (the earth itself is a smallish satellite to one of the smaller stars in this galaxy). But this theory could not account for rays whose energy is above a critical limit...
Counting Showers. For many years Professor Bruno Rossi of M.I.T. has hunt ed for cosmic rays above this critical limit. The original energy of a cosmic ray can be measured by counting the second-ary particles that it showers down on the earth after colliding with air molecules in the high atmosphere. If its energy is 1016 (io million billion) electron volts, it generates millions of particles, mostly electrons and mesons which spread over many acres of ground. More powerful rays give even bigger showers...
...safe return of Russian Space Mutts Strelka and Belka apparently ensures that man will suffer no physiological ill effects in near space -but the psychophysiological impact of zero gravity and extreme isolation has yet to be tested on a human being under actual space conditions. Only minimum shielding against cosmic radiation will be needed on manned earth satellites; their low orbits (125 miles for the U.S.'s Mercury, 200 miles for the U.S.S.R.) will keep them at least 500 miles below the belt of dangerous radiation particles that girdles the earth...
...Saturn (1,500,000 Ibs. of thrust), plans to flight-test cheaper, deep-space electrical propulsion systems in 1962, and hopes to make a manned moon orbit in 1963. But the problems of a round trip across 480,000 miles of space are fantastic. The greatest hazard is cosmic radiation. The U.S.'s interplanetary probe, Pioneer V, reported a sinister, unpredictable enemy lurking in space: wide-ranging "storms" of deadly proton particles, spewed forth by the sun, of such energy (up to 20 billion electron volts per particle) that they will easily penetrate the thickest protective shield...