Word: venuses
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Right on target, more than four months after leaving the earth, two Russian spacecraft last week plunged into the murky atmosphere of Venus. Both Venus 5 and Venus 6 had apparently stood up well under the rigors of their 217-million-mile trips. Each spacecraft successfully ejected an instrumented capsule that radioed back information while parachuting toward the Venusian surface. At week's end, however, both capsules appeared to have fallen victim to intense Venusian heat before making their landings on the planet's surface...
When the 2,491-lb. Venus 5 was 31,000 miles from Venus, Soviet ground controllers sent a signal that separated the instrument capsule from the speeding craft. Protected by a heat shield while its descent was slowing, the capsule eventually deployed a parachute and began radioing information about the temperature, pressure and chemical composition of the atmosphere. After 53 minutes of transmission, the capsule's signals abruptly ceased. With no word from the Russians, Western scientists concluded that the intense heat of the lower atmosphere had disabled the transmitters before the capsule crashed. They recalled that...
...that Debussy's sensitivity leads not to sentimentality but to a more pungent commerce with the particulars of the sensible world. This reemergence of intense concern for the small things is a sign of artistic vitality. Compare the above with a line on an injured snail from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis...
...BEYOND THE MOON. In 1971, NASA plans to place two spacecraft in orbit around Mars. In 1973, two "Viking" missions are scheduled to make soft landings on the planet's surface. Also proposed is a Venus-Mercury "minitour" using the Venusian gravitational force to whip a satellite on toward Mercury. Perhaps most visionary of all is NASA's dream of "Grand Tour" flights to the "outer" planets-Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The four outer planets will be aligned in such a way that a single craft launched between 1976 and 1978 could fly by all of them...
Next, a gang of thieves try to bully Fidelman into art forgery. He proves to be possibly the first copyist in the world with painter's block. But when he finally does manage to complete a counterfeit of Titian's Venus of Urbino, he likes the fake so much that he steals it back from the thieves in preference to the real thing. Skillfully Malamud somehow turns this gesture into a superbly comic act of integrity...