Word: martian
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...largely because of its inability to wrest more funds from a Congress whose members are already divided over the $24 billion tab for Apollo. Last week, as head of a task force on future U.S. space objectives, Vice President Spiro Agnew said the nation should aim for a manned Martian landing by the end of the century. But Agnew conceded that the other members of the panel might be more cautious about a manned Martian expedition...
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...