Word: martian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Barnacle Bill. Yogi. Casper. Scooby Doo. Flat Top, Boo-Boo. The Couch. Souffle. After billions of years of anonymity, a motley collection of rocks on the Martian flood plain called Ares Vallis at last had names of their own. And back on Earth last week, the Pathfinder scientists who had playfully nicknamed the rocks were enjoying, as one of them phrased it, "a rock festival," reveling in the torrent of data being yielded by the rock stars and their surroundings...
...undisputed star of the week, however, surpassing even the rocks, was the 25-lb. Sojourner, which Rob Manning, Pathfinder's flight-systems chief engineer, dubbed "The Little Rover That Could." Having inched its way down the steeply inclined lander ramp, the six-wheeled Sojourner crept gingerly onto the Martian surface early last week and, in its first official scientific experiment, shoved the nose of its X-ray spectrometer into the dust at the foot of the lander...
After bombarding the reddish dirt with helium nuclei and analyzing the resulting patterns of radiation, the spectrometer revealed that the soil was rich in iron and virtually identical to that examined at other sites 21 years earlier by the Viking landers. This suggested to scientists that Martian topsoil is widely distributed by the planet's frequent global dust storms. Why the reddish hue? "The surface of Mars is rusting," explains Jim Bell, a Cornell University scientist...
...soup"--a nutrient broth--gave off a burst of oxygen. In another, unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide were released. While both results produced flurries of excitement at J.P.L., scientists eventually--though reluctantly--concluded that the gases resulted not from life processes, but from some exotic Martian chemistry. Their conclusion was bolstered when neither lander detected any organic compounds that would have signaled the presence of microorganisms, dead or alive...
...computer in his home to view some pyrotechnics of the digital kind. Gore had been following Pathfinder's progress all day. And now he was seeing the first images, sent by E-mail to a few top officials before they were made public. The color mosaic of the rocky Martian landscape as seen from Pathfinder so excited Gore that he rushed back to his White House office after the fireworks to download still more pictures. It was close to midnight before he went home...