Word: probe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...super-powerful telescope had been trained on the morning star last week, it might have seen a tiny, spidery object all vanes and antennae, creep slowly past the blazing crescent of Venus. This was the U.S. space-probe Mariner II. For more than four months it had drifted away from the earth, coasting down a long ellipse toward the orbit of Venus. Its radio voice grew faint as the miles multiplied into millions, then into tens of millions. But it was never too faint heard by anxious scientists at Goldstone station in the Mojave Desert...
...sign was the probe's temperature which climbed ominously higher as its elliptical orbit neared the sun. Nervously the scientists watched the faint telemetered reports of Mariner's thermometers. Just before the Venus-pass, Mariner reported a temperature dangerously close to the heat that would burst its batteries...
Inside the probe, a built-in timer had been programmed to turn on the mam instruments at the proper time. But that time passed, and no report of action came over the probe's radio voice. Then, 3 hr. 20 mins later, the built-in alarm clock got I second chance. But this time also it failed to awake the probe's instruments...
Alien Planet. The probe was already close to Venus when it opened its instrument eyes: an infra-red and a microwave detector. Both of them worked perfectly. Instantly Mariner's radio came alive and began relaying the secrets of Venus to earth, where they were typed in code. In Washington a spokesman for the -Aeronautics and Space Administration announced jubilantly: "We are currently scanning and gathering data from the planet." Then the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, which built Manner II, relayed its actual voice-an eerie, organ-like music. It would take several weeks to turn the signals...
Besides recording temperatures the probe may also disclose the presence of water vapor on Venus...