Word: martian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quartets, Orbs is a kind of astronaughty tour of love and life on the planets. In the Venusian Spring segment, the Sun God (Taylor) conducts a primer course in lovemaking, repeatedly stroking his loins until two couples get the idea and engage in a "micro-orgy." This leads to Martian Summer, in which the Sun God, wearing a mask on the back of his head, is by sudden twists and turns a scowling accuser and a smiling protector. Most ludicrous are the earthlings, who in Terrestrial Autumn romp through a slapstick wedding scene that teeters on the brink of banality...
Many a scientist's fond hope that there was life on Mars was dashed in 1963 when spectrographic studies revealed that the Martian atmosphere is as much as 50 times thinner than the earth's. It seemed almost certain that a relatively weak Martian gravity had allowed most of the planet's primitive atmosphere to leak off into space. There appeared to be practically no possibility that any of the lightest element, hydrogen, or its compounds, had remained long enough to play their essential role in the early evolution of life. Now it appears that such pessimism...
...paper presented to an American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Astrophysicist Lewis Kaplan disclosed that spectrograms of the Martian atmosphere, made when the planet was 70 million miles from the earth last year, suggest that Mars has a concentration of hydrogen compounds in its atmosphere 1,000 times greater than the earth's. Those compounds probably include methane derivatives and possibly methane itself-a finding that could be significant because methane, or "marsh gas,"* is produced on earth by anaerobic bacteria, which do not require oxygen to exist. Even if the Martian methane...
Strenuous Climate. Kaplan's discovery was made possible by French Astronomers Pierre and Janine Connes, who developed new equipment at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence that enabled them to produce the most detailed spectrograms of Mars ever made. Originally intended to reveal data about atmospheric pressure at the Martian surface, the spectrograms were of such high quality that they revealed unexpected absorption lines which had been indistinguishable in spectrograms recorded by less sensitive instruments. After careful analysis, Kaplan concluded that many of the absorption lines could have been caused only by reflected sunlight passing through hydrogen compounds...
...discovery of methanelike compounds on Mars, Kaplan believes, leaves only one important obstacle to life on the red planet: the apparent lack of water in liquid form. What little Martian water there is exists as polar-cap frost or vapor in the atmosphere; there are no oceans or even lakes similar to those in which the first terrestrial life evolved. "It would be a strenuous climate for life," says Kaplan, "but then not all life-even on earth-requires liquid water...