Word: soiling
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...spindly three-legged spacecraft sits silently on the dry, barren landscape. Suddenly, on command from controllers some 200 million miles away, the robot comes alive. A motor whirls; a slender, 10-ft. long arm reaches out, opens a small scoop and digs up some of the reddish soil...
This dramatic scenario is no longer confined to the daydreams of imaginative exobiologists.* Last week technicians at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, Calif., were finishing two miniaturized laboratories that will be able to test Martian soil for evidence of life. Next August, in the climax to NASA'S $1 billion Project Viking, two unmanned spacecraft will be fired aloft from Cape Canaveral. After an eleven-month journey, the Viking ships will swing into orbit around Mars. Each will release a lander containing a life-seeking laboratory. After descending with the aid of parachute and braking rockets, the first sterilized...
...test, a small sample of Martian soil will be partially submerged in a nutrient-rich solution (called "chicken soup" by the experimenters). If any Martian organisms grow in the broth and give off carbon dioxide or other common byproducts of respiration-like life processes, instruments will detect these chemicals. In another test, soil will be exposed to a nutrient containing radioactive carbon 14. If any microorganisms consume the nutrient and give off carbon-bearing gases as metabolic wastes, those wastes will be radioactively "tagged" and readily identified. Lastly, a Martian soil sample will be exposed to xenon "sunlight...
...squeeze higher yields out of corn already planted. But most farm experts remain discouraged. "So much damage has already been done," says Billy Ray Gowdy, commissioner of agriculture in Oklahoma, where farmers are worried that there will not be enough rain for a good sorghum harvest and that the soil will be far too dry to plant a new crop of winter wheat...
...grain belt, gouging great creases in the fields and delaying planting of new crops. Then the rain stopped, and for well over a month now, the sun has risen like a bright brass gong in a white sky. While days, then weeks passed without rain, the sun parched the soil and left corn stalks brittle, stunted and dead. From the Dakotas southward to Texas, from Kansas east to parts of Ohio, the most baleful weather in a generation is raising the specter of economic disaster for Midwest farmers and the businessmen who depend on them. The big drought is daily...