Word: vaporize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...environments. First it must face life on Earth, snuggled by gentle gravitation and sheltered by the atmosphere. So careful are its guardians to keep it clean and uncontaminated, they even dress like medical men and work in an antiseptic, hospital-like atmosphere. While the spacecraft resists corrosion from water vapor and the sea-salted air of Cape Canaveral, anxious humans are always around to protect it; it gets what energy it needs through a bundle of wires called an umbilical cable. This sheltered period is comparable to a baby's gestation in its mother's womb...
Heat Balance. Once Mariner was safely on its way, Physicist Pickering and his JPL teammates watched over their creation like anxious parents. There was so much that could go wrong. Materials that are well behaved in the atmosphere may be useless in space. Even some metals turn to vapor and must be used with caution. Another peril is heat. Space itself has no temperature (having no matter that can be hot or cold), but each object in space assumes a temperature that depends on the balance between the radiation that it absorbs and the radiation that it emits...
...dark, and finally the sunlit side. The microwave radiometer reported a surface temperature of about 800° F. (melting point of lead: 621.5° F.), which seems to vary hardly at all over the whole planet, dark side as well as light side. It showed no detectable water vapor...
...fine dust, kicked up from the surface by tremendous winds in the dense atmosphere, but Professor Kaplan has a more picturesque theory. He thinks they are hydrocarbon droplets similar to the water droplets in earthly clouds. The droplets condense in the cool top of the atmosphere, but stay in vapor form in the lower parts, where the temperature rises above 200° F. So the dark Venusian surface has clear, compressed, oily air. Infra-red rays from the sun penetrate both clouds and atmosphere, but are hindered by the CO2 when they try to escape. This trapped energy keeps...