Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sort of space research. For weeks two Navy scientists have been standing by in South Dakota, waiting for a break in the weather to soar aloft in a "Strato-lab" balloon carrying a 16-in. Schmidt telescope. Target of the flight will be Mars, now unusually close to the earth. When Mars is photographed by surface telescopes, the fine detail on its surface is blurred by turbulence in the atmosphere. There should be little or no turbulence above the 16-mile (80,000-ft.) level to which the Strato-lab will carry its telescope; photographs taken with it should give...
...Schein also hopes for evidence that antimatter, recently created in man's laboratories, exists in nature. Antimatter is annihilated instantly when it hits ordinary matter. But antimatter particles arriving from space may penetrate the earth's thin outer atmosphere to the 120,000-ft. level without suffering fatal collisions. If one of them hits the photographic plates, it should make a tremendous splash...
...there is antimatter in the universe, says Dr. Schein, there may be anti-gravity too. Antiprotons should rise upward, instead of falling toward the earth. The great balloon experiment may find evidence of such offbeat behavior. The tracks may even show that the elementary particles (protons, neutrons, etc.) are not really elementary. Each may contain a complicated structure whose behavior turns out more strange than anything yet imagined...
Near the Bay of Plenty on New Zealand's North Island is an uneasy, earth-quaky land full of hot springs, geysers, active volcanoes and puddles of boiling mud. Trying to tap the power of this natural boiler, government engineers have dotted the area with wells, out of which steam pours with a screeching roar that makes jet engines sound like whippoorwills. Last week six of the screaming jets had been harnessed to a turbine and were generating 6,400 kw. of geothermal electricity...
...siltstone a few hundred feet below the present surface. Beneath it, porous rock accumulates steam like a kind of natural boiler. A well only 1,000 ft. deep taps this reservoir. Some of the steam is "juvenile," coming from water that was trapped in the deep interior when the earth was young and rising upward through the deep faults. The rest derives from surface water that has trickled down through cracks and been turned to steam by heat from below. When the steam gets to the surface, its pressure is about 190 Ibs. per sq. in. and its temperature about...