Word: sunlights
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Bright with reflected sunlight, and spread across 169,300 miles of space, the rings of Saturn gleam through telescopes as one of the most glorious sights in the sky. They seem as solid and substantial as Saturn itself. But astronomers know better: the great rings are really next to nothing at all. Stars shine right through them, and when they turn edge-on toward earth they vanish completely. This should not be surprising, say Drs. Allan Cook and Fred Franklin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, Mass. The beautiful rings, as the two astronomers see them, are less than...
When the earth is between the sun and Saturn and sunlight is falling on the rings from over the earth's shoulder, the rings get suddenly brighter. This effect can be explained by an assumption that the rings are made of small particles, probably ice, and that the nearer ones cover the shadows that they cast on others. Cook and Franklin measured the rate of brightening with precise modern instruments and decided that about one-twentieth of the rings' volume is filled with particles of ice-fog that are about one one-thousandth of an inch in diameter...
When carefully analyzed, Stratoscope's spectroscopic studies should yield new information on the atmosphere and climate of the red planet. Mars has no light of its own. The light that it sends to the earth is sunlight that passes down through the thin Martian atmosphere and is reflected out again. Loss of certain infra-red wave lengths during these two passages will prove the presence of water vapor, carbon dioxide and other interesting, life-supporting constituents...
...Four Days of Naples. On Sept. 8, 1943, the day Badoglio surrendered to Eisenhower, the lid of a manhole lifted hesitantly in a Neapolitan alley and a draft dodger squinted at the unaccustomed sunlight. "La 'uerr' ê finood'!" the mob above him bellowed in delirium. The war was over for Sicily, si. But for Naples it was far from over. On Sept. 12, the Panzers rumbled into town as the Italian garrison stumbled off in all directions. Then flying squads of German soldiers burst into the Vomero, the city's principal slum, and gun-butted...
...stage, with Mariner II in its nose, went smoothly into parking orbit. After 16 minutes, its engine fired again, soaring out on a curving course that would lead to Venus. A few minutes later, a cluster of exploding pins popped and the spacecraft spread its, wings into the hard sunlight. All this was reported by telemetry to JPL's 85-ft. dish antenna in South Africa and relayed to the control center at the lab. "We were flying blind during lift-off and injection," says Bill Collier, Assistant Project Manager. "But about the time the panels came open, there...