Word: martian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Better Focus. To obtain their proof, Stephen Little of the University of Texas and Astronomer Ronald Schorn of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory turned to the same kind of tools that they and other scientists had previously used in attempts to detect Martian water: the telescope and the spectrograph, which breaks light into its rainbow (spectrum) of colors and records it on a photographic plate. With the aid of a $100,000 NASA grant, mirrors had just been refinished on the 82-in. McDonald telescope, bettering its focusing by a factor of three. The optics of the spectrograph had also been...
Furthermore, their spectrograms came when the planets were nearing conjunction (closest approach) and the earth was rapidly approaching Mars; this motion shortened the wave lengths of light being reflected from Mars. On the resulting spectrograms, the characteristic lines of Martian light were thus shifted away from the spectral lines produced by the earth's atmosphere, making them easily distinguishable...
After the spectrograms were developed, Schorn saw what he had been looking for. "There was the water-pow!" he says. The dark absorption lines, which stood out "as bold as fence posts," revealed that all the water vapor in the Martian atmosphere equals about a cubic mile of water, less than in a large lake on earth. Spread over the planet's surface, it would be only a thousandth of an inch deep. There was about twice as much water vapor in the Northern Hemisphere (where it is now late summer) than in the southern half (where...
Although the results do not prove the existence of water on the Martian surface, Astronomer Harlan Smith, director of the McDonald Observatory, speculates that if water is found in the atmosphere, it must be stored in greater quantities in the form of permafrost at the poles and in the ground...
...confirmation of water on Mars keeps alive the slim hopes that some form of Martian life exists and that the seasonal darkening is indeed caused by vegetation. But scientists will probably have to wait for a more definite answer until the Mars landing in 1973 of the unmanned U.S. Project Viking capsules, which will be equipped with life-detection instruments. Because the best prospects for life would almost certainly exist in the most humid areas, Astronomer Schorn suggests that the first landing be made at the edge of a receding polar cap, where the Martian soil should...