Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Convinced by the findings of the Apollo missions that the moon is lifeless, the earth's two superpowers were concentrating on the next target of opportunity: Mars. A pair of spacecraft, America's Mariner 9 and Russia's Mars 2, were in orbit around the Red Planet, seeking out conditions and features that might support life and radioing their findings back to earth across more than 90 million miles of space. A capsule ejected from Mars 2 lay on the Martian surface, possibly equipped with instruments that could sample the soil and the atmosphere and detect the presence of life...
...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...
...haze hung over Pasadena last week, but at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory there was much less concern about the local weather than about conditions on Mars, some 80 million miles away. As scientists monitored the pictures and scientific data being transmitted from Mariner 9, in its second week in orbit around the distant planet, Mars was still enshrouded in a raging dust storm. While apparently beginning to subside, the giant duster will probably obscure much of the surface for weeks to come. Faced with the growing possibility that the Martian skies will not clear up completely during Mariner...
...Western scientists had expected Mars 2 to arrive at the red planet by week's end. Mars 3 five days later. As the days passed without any word from Moscow, there was growing concern that the first of the two Russian craft might have failed to go into orbit around Mars and sped by into distant space...
...dots in earthbound telescopes. Closeup photographs of Phobos and Deimos (named after the sons of Mars, the Roman god of war) could finally put to rest the imaginative theory of Soviet Astrophysicist I.S. Shklovskii. In an attempt to explain certain peculiarities-now attributed to misinterpretation of data-in the orbit of Phobos. Shklovskii suggested in 1959 that the moonlet might be hollow, possibly a satellite lofted by some long-vanished civilization...