Word: ultraviolet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Peering into the night skies, astronomers find their view obscured by the ever-present veil of the earth's atmosphere. Swirling air currents blur the images of stars and planets. Scattered light and auroras in the atmosphere blot out faint stars. The thick blanket of air soaks up ultraviolet light and other radiation given off by distant stars, thus depriving scientists of valuable clues about the nature of the universe around them. Last week U.S. astronomers dramatically thrust their telescopes through the atmospheric veil and began to see the sky in a new light...
Locked onto its target by a combination of control jets and spinning inertia wheels, OAO for several hours examined the ultraviolet emissions, telemetering its findings back to earth...
...time that it turned to its next target, a super giant star named Iota Carina, the orbiting observatory had already transmitted a record amount of ul traviolet data. In the previous 15 years, scientists had accumulated only three hours of ultraviolet stargazing during the flights of 40 telescope-equipped sounding rockets, which briefly poke their noses above the atmosphere before falling back to earth...
...next six months, OAO is scheduled to study more than 50,000 stars, most of them of the hot, young variety that emit 95% of their energy in heretofore unobservable ultraviolet light. From the ultraviolet TV pictures and data that the satellite transmits, scientists hope to learn more about the chemical composition of the stars, their temperatures, their rate of burning and their total energy emission. These characteristics in turn should help them understand how stars are born out of cosmic dust and gas, how heavy elements are formed in stars and how the universe itself evolved...
...like a giant pince-nez; they thus hug the contour of the land while presenting no joints to catch the sharp ski edges or the skier's thumb and fingers, should he fall. In addition, the units are covered with thick, round-ended bristles, colored green to guard against ultraviolet rays that make the plastic brittle...