Word: hydrogenating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shuffling the Standings. After a plague of misfortune and mismanagement had put it three years behind schedule, the Surveyor success was doubly sweet. Equipment broke down during tests and had to be redesigned. The second-stage Centaur-the first liquid-hydrogen rocket-had several mishaps and had flown only one completely successful mission before last week's shot. Summarizing the program, the House Space Committee characterized it as "one of the least orderly and most poorly executed NASA projects...
...impressive step toward making chemistry exact and predictable: they have made the first direct measurement of the minimum energy required to cause one of the simplest chemical reactions known to science. An absolute minimum of one-third of an electron volt is needed, they discovered, to split a hydrogen molecule into two hydrogen atoms and to combine one of them with a deuterium atom to form deuterium hydride. An addition of any less energy and the reaction will not occur...
Beginning with the light of shortest wave length (and thus the highest energy), they aimed a beam from the grating through a Pyrex cylinder containing hydrogen and deuterium iodide gas, which breaks down when exposed to light. When molecules of deuterium iodide were struck by photons in the light beam, they split into fast-moving atoms of deuterium and sluggish, heavier atoms of iodine. Some of the speeding deuterium atoms in turn collided with hydrogen molecules in the cylinder, knocking off one of the hydrogen atoms and combining with the other to form deuterium hydride...
...wave length and lower energy, until they failed to find molecules of deuterium hydride in the cylinder-no matter how long the gases had been exposed to the light. At this particular wave length, it seemed clear, the deuterium atoms had not been given enough velocity to split the hydrogen molecules and combine with the freed hydrogen atoms...
Ramsey participated in the discovery, some years ago, that the heavy hydrogen nucleus is egg-shaped rather than spherical. More recently, with other Harvard scientists, he has been working to determine the distribution of electrical charges within the proton. In 1960, his laboratory built the first atomic hydrogen maser, which could become the most accurate atomic clock in the world...