Word: tombaugh
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...examples of patient scientific research. After the discoveries of Uranus and Neptune in 1781 and 1846 it was suspected, because of small irregularities in the motions of these distant wanderers, that there was still another, even fainter, planet. Astronomers calculated a probable orbit, and in March 1929 young Clyde Tombaugh took up the search. He examined scores of telescopic photographs, each showing tens of thousands of star images, in pairs under the blink comparator, or dual microscope. It often took three days to scan a single pair. It was exhausting, eye-cracking work-in his own words, "brutal tediousness...
Happily joining the debate last week, another scientist at the A.A.A.S. meeting declared that the Mariner pictures do suggest the possibility of Martian life. New Mexico State University Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, said that the faint markings on seven of Mariner's 22 photographs coincide with the controversial and elusive "canals" and "oases" that he and others have mapped in telescopic observations of Mars...
Melting Martian Frost. Tombaugh found that the largest crater in the best Mariner photograph is located where visual observations have spotted an oasis. Parallel markings in the southern part of the crater coincide with the position of a short canal mapped by Astronomer Percival Lowell...
...Tombaugh believes that the canals are faults or fractures, several miles wide, in the Martian crust. Their darkening and fading may be caused, he says, by the intermittent escape of hot gases that melt a thin layer of frost and vegetation. The oases where the faults intersect, he speculates, are probably impact craters where moisture gathers and promotes the growth of moss or lichenlike plants hardy enough to withstand the harsh Martian climate...