Word: saturn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Phoebe, Saturn's ninth moon, was discovered in 1898, and astronomers have been vainly looking for others ever since. Their long quest has finally been rewarded. French Astronomer Audouin Dollfus reported last week that he had found another friend for Phoebe-a tenth moon orbiting close to the outer edge of Saturn's rings...
...actually been hindered by the spectacular rings, which reflect sunlight brilliantly, obscuring other objects in the vicinity of the planet. But though the rings are wide, they are also incredibly thin-perhaps even less than a foot thick. Thus every 14 years or so, when the earth passes through Saturn's equatorial plane and astronomers can get an edge-on view of the rings, their glow practically disappears. In place of their familiar, disklike shape, the rings appear as a faint, straight line, much like the side view of a phonograph record held flat at eye level...
...December, when one of the infrequent edge-on views occurred, Dollfus photographed Saturn through a telescope at the Paris Observatory's Meudon station. When the plates were developed, he detected on several of them a tiny spot of light only about 52,000 miles from the planet's surface. Reasonably confident that he had found a tenth Saturnian moon, he promptly telegraphed news of his discovery to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the world's clearing house for celestial discoveries...
Alerted by the Smithsonian's announcement last week, Astronomer Richard Walker of the Naval Observatory's Flagstaff station examined Saturn photographs that he had taken on the night of December 18. On four of his plates he found what looked like a tiny droplet superimposed on the edge-on rings. The confirmation of the discovery will entitle Dollfus to name the new moon. If he abides by tradition established in identifying Saturn's moons, he will pick the name of a mythological character associated with Saturn, a Roman god of agriculture...
...using an ion engine instead of chemical fuel for deep space acceleration, Stewart believes, scientists will be able to launch outer planet probes with rockets as small as the Atlas-Centaur, or send considerably larger payloads aloft with the Saturn 5. Combined with gravity assists from the planets, the ion engines should allow sophisticated unmanned probes to give man a close look at the outer planets, regions outside the solar system - and even the sun itself...