Word: moone
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Radioactive Moon. Russia's Lunik carried an instrument to measure the radioactivity of the moon's surface. Neither Kuiper nor Gold believes that it could have worked at the distance (4,660 miles) at which the Lunik swept past the moon, but they would be grateful for any information that the Russians choose to release. Dr. Kuiper believes that the moon's surface is blazing with radioactivity. On the earth, he says, the thick layer of air is the shielding equivalent of 3 ft. of lead or 33 ft. of water, protects the surface from many kinds...
...Planets. Nearest planet to the earth is Venus. It is about as big as the earth and has an atmosphere, but it seems even less attractive as real estate than the airless, sun-seared moon. Its atmosphere is so cloudy that outsiders, peering from the earth, can see only its slightly yellowish cloud deck, which sometimes shows faint, impermanent markings...
...simplest kind of instrumented space probe can gather much valuable information without landing on the moon or a planet. A picture of the back of the moon is one of the easiest prizes. Interplanetary space is by no means empty. It contains a very thin gas of unknown composition, and through it a "wind" of high-speed particles blows outward from the sun. This wind may be dangerous; it should be studied carefully before manned ships are launched deeply into space...
...space art improves, instrumented vehicles will make soft landings on the moon, braked gently to the airless surface by retrorockets. Once they get there, they can look around with television eyes, telling the earth what they see. When the probes get good enough to tackle the planets, they can swoop into the atmosphere of Venus for a look at its unknown surface, swing around Mars looking for signs of life...
...unsolved problem is communication. It will do no good to send a space probe to Mars if communication with it is lost, as happened to Lunik soon after it passed the moon. Radio signals can cover any desired distance if given sufficient power, but the only power sources now available are heavy, short-lived chemical batteries or feeble solar batteries. To tell its story properly from the distance of Mars, a probe needs as much power as an earth-side radio station. One possibility is a nuclear battery getting its energy from radioactive materials. Another (one form of which...