Word: venuses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...balloon cooled and dropped to 68,000 ft. Commander Ross dumped 300 lbs. of "sunset ballast" (mostly steel shot) to boost it up again. Though the gondola was insulated, it soon grew deathly cold. Both men shivered so hard that they literally shook the whole gondola. When Venus finally rose at 3:30 a.m., Moore started to turn the telescope toward it. But whenever the men moved, the gondola corkscrewed and rotated, vibrating all the time from their shivering. "It was very hard to point in a given direction," says Moore. "It showed that Newton's action and reaction...
...afterthought were two scientists-Commander Malcolm Ross, 40, a balloonist from the Office of Naval Research, and Physicist-Engineer Charles B. Moore Jr., 39, a balloon expert who works for Arthur D. Little Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Their object: to get mankind's first good look at Venus clear of most of the earth's muffling atmosphere...
...telescope mounted on top of the gondola and manipulated by remote control by the scientists inside. But they ran into immediate trouble. Take-off had been delayed for three hours by a minor fire in the gondola, and by the time the balloon reached 80,000 ft., Venus was too low to catch in the telescope. They were forced to wait all through the long...
...Moore finally got Venus in the telescope sights. A tracking system held the image in the telescope's focus for a few minutes. Then the balloon started slowly down, drifting south over Nebraska and into Kansas. As they approached the ground, the crew cut the gondola loose from the balloon and popped a 100-ft. parachute. A gusty wind caught the parachute, dragged the gondola across pastures and through fences for half a mile before marines following in helicopters caught it and cut it loose. Bruised and shaken, the scientists climbed out. The gondola was a battered wreck...
Water for Life. The data the scientists brought back to Dr. Strong proved worth the trouble. Inscribed on a thin strip of wax paper were spectroscopic readings of the light from Venus. They showed that when the sun's light passes through Venus' atmosphere, certain infra-red lines are partially absorbed, providing dramatic evidence that Venus' cloudy atmosphere contains water vapor...