Word: planets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Hugh Auchincloss Brown, 96, engineer who believed that vast polar icecaps would wipe out civilization in this century; in New York City. Brown, author of Cataclysms of the Earth (1967), predicted that the accumulation of ice at the Antarctic would upset the planet's equilibrium and cause it to flip, reversing the North and South Poles. If the catastrophe comes to pass, New York, according to Brown, will be buried under 13 miles of water...
...National Security Agency is like the Jorge Luis Borges fable of the infinite library in which all of the planet's knowledge and information reside, maddeningly encoded. Into the NSA's heavily guarded, three-story headquarters outside Washington every week the world's secrets flow from U.S. spy ships, surveillance planes, satellites and hundreds of electronic listening posts round the globe. Unlike the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, the NSA's mission is strictly communications-electronics and cryptology. It is the ultimate bug, the source of most of the nation's foreign intelligence information...
...hellish 900° F. Its atmosphere, consisting largely of carbon dioxide, is at least 90 times as thick as the earth's, producing crushing surface pressures of 1,500 Ibs. per sq. in. Its clouds are laden with sulfuric acid. Yet a major mystery remains: Why has a planet so like the earth in size, mass and density evolved in such a dramatically different...
While the lander transmitted its historic picture, the first from another planet's surface, the mother ship swung into orbit around Venus to become its first satellite (Venus has no known natural moons) and continued to transmit information on its environment. At week's end, Moscow announced that Venera 10 had repeated its twin's triumph...
...last U.S. craft to venture near Venus was Mariner 10; it took the first closeup pictures of the Venusian clouds in February 1974 en route to the sun's innermost planet, Mercury. In 1978 NASA hopes to launch an equally ambitious probe. A Pioneer spacecraft will drop five separate exploratory packages into Venus' atmosphere-provided, of course, that budget cutters do not kill the mission before it gets off the ground...