Word: kuiper
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...week Mars paid one of its close (63,000,000 miles away) visits to earth. Its inhabitants, if any, could have taken a good look at their big, cloud-blotched neighbor. And staring down the Martians' hypothetical throats from McDonald Observatory, Texas was Dutch-born Astronomer Gerard Peter Kuiper...
...Kuiper was full of scientific eagerness, because Mars rarely comes so close. Also, he had a brand-new supersensitive infrared spectrometer. With this gadget, he hoped to find out, at least, whether the climate on Mars can support the kind of life we have on earth...
...Kuiper thinks that his infra-red spectrometer (a wartime development) has answered some of these questions by identifying certain gases and solids on Mars. Last autumn, he found that the atmosphere of Mars contains a small amount of carbon dioxide, which is necessary to plants (the basic living organisms). Without any carbon dioxide, plants cannot live, but too much would indicate that there are no plants on Mars to consume...
Water & Greenery. Last week, Kuiper focused his spectrometer on the gleaming icecap, dwindling fast in the Martian May. It turned out to be "water in the solid state" (ice, snow or hoarfrost). If it had been solid carbon dioxide (dry ice), it would have shown an entirely different spectrum...
...Next, Kuiper examined the greenish areas. Their spectra indicated that they could not be vegetation like trees or grass. But they might be lowly lichens like those that grow on the dry rocks near McDonald Observatory. Lichens need no water in liquid form. Martian lichenlike plants might get enough water out of vapor from the icecaps, which evaporate without melting...