Word: planet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gerard P. Kuiper's closeup of Pluto with the 200-in. Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain, which revealed the planet to be 3,550 miles in diameter (a previous estimate: about twice this size) and the second smallest planet in the solar system (TIME, June...
Such specialized patter will probably give no trouble at all to admirers of Comic-Strip Hero Buck Rogers and his legion of spaceship-flying, planet-exploring imitators. But to those who have never exposed themselves to the comic strips, the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that spews forth from every page of Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman may cause some confusion for a while...
...captures a group of space pirates who try to hold up his ship in mid-stratosphere, invents a velocity intensifier which ups his ship's speed to 670 million m.p.h. As his crowning feat, he manages to immaterialize his spaceship so that it can pass straight through the planet Jupiter, then materialize it again on the other side. Author Nelson Bond, who used to write westerns, has merely put a Space Age icing on the old Wild West conventions. There is even a land rush-not by bumpy covered wagons, but by spaceships streaking away with jets blazing toward...
...better when the Palomar telescope takes motion pictures of Mars at the next favorable apposition, in 1956. The 200-in. mirror gathers so much light that it can take a snapshot of Mars in a very brief exposure. A continuous strip of such pictures should catch the planet at instants when its image is not being jiggled by atmospheric irregularities...
Pluto, the outermost planet of the solar system, is so small, dim and far away (3.7 billion miles) that astronomers have seen it only as a point of light like a star, have had to estimate its size by calculating the apparent effect of its gravitation upon the motion of Neptune. Measured in this indirect way, Pluto was thought by some to be almost as big as the earth. Last week Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of Yerkes Observatory, having measured Pluto's diameter with the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, announced that those estimates were probably wrong...