Word: martianize
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...planet Mars. Although they were accompanied by few technical details, the pictures of what looked like a flying samovar gave some clues to its operation: after its conical heat shield (not shown) was jettisoned, a small parachute was released, retarding the capsule's descent slightly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Then the larger main chute was unfurled from a ring-shaped container under the lander's spherical body. Finally, a burst from the ship's retrorocket provided additional crucial braking for the landing. After only 20 seconds on the surface, however, the lander's TV camera...
...That any Martian creatures, turtle-like or otherwise, will be discovered during the current Mars missions seems highly unlikely. Mariner 9, mapping the planet with its twin TV cameras and using ultraviolet and infra-red sensors to probe the surface and the atmosphere, will never come close enough in its far-ranging 860-mile by 10,600-mile orbit to photograph any life forms. Although the Russians have announced that their Mars 2 lander carried a Soviet pennant to the Martian surface, they have been silent about the performance of any life detectors or other instruments it might have carried...
...areas where Mariner's cameras have been able to peer through the huge dust storm that still obscures much of the planet, the surface is also remarkably smooth, leading some scientists to theorize that the region was scoured clean by glaciers as the polar cap grew during Martian winters and then receded again. If glaciers were indeed responsible, their presence would indicate that there is more water in the polar cap (which is composed largely of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice) than anyone had supposed. Mariner has also discovered four craters that the U.S. Geological Survey's Harold Masursky...
Turning its cameras away from the Martian surface. Mariner provided a bonus for scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: the first closeup pictures of the two tiny moonlets of Mars. Deimos and Phobos. Sharpened and clarified by computers, the photographs finally laid to rest an enticing theory put forth a few years ago by Soviet Astrophysicist I.S. Shklovskii. who said that the apparent behavior of Phobos in orbit meant that it could be hollow. That in turn suggested to Shklovskii that the moonlet might be an artificial satellite, lofted into orbit by a long-extinct Martian civilization. Instead, Mariner...
...translated into English as canals, which suggested that they were artificially made. That inspired an erstwhile American diplomat named Percival Lowell (of the Boston Lowells) to take up astronomy and establish an observatory near dry, cloudless Flagstaff, Ariz., principally to study Mars. Lowell spotted hundreds of "canals" on the Martian surface and contributed the theory that they were the work of an advanced civilization. Belief in intelligent life on Mars was dramatized by H.G. Wells in his novel The War of the Worlds and carried into contemporary times by another Welles named Orson, whose 1938 radio broadcast of the novel...