Word: venusians
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...shaped, instrument-crammed capsule. Although the mother ship was quickly incinerated by the frictional heat of its plunge, the capsule was insulated by an ablative coating that gradually burned off as it heated. At an altitude of 15.5 miles, when its velocity had been sufficiently slowed by Venusian "air" resistance, the capsule automatically deployed a parachute and began drifting slowly toward the surface. As it descended through the whirling gases, the capsule sniffed them, noted their composition, temperature and pressure, and dutifully reported them back to earth...
After four-month journeys through space, Russia's Venus 4 and the U.S. Mariner 5 spacecraft will both reach Venus this week. No matter what the space probes find, most scientists have already written off the possibility that Venusian life exists; the planet's apparent surface temperature is approximately 800° F., above the melting point of lead...
Just the same, say Astronomer and Exobiologist* Carl Sagan and Biophysicist Harold Morowitz, it is conceivable that earth's nearest planetary neighbor could be home to living organisms. In balloonlike form, Venusian life could float in the dense atmosphere, never approaching the searing surface...
...Clouds. Of the planetary environments investigated so far by telescope and space probe, the scientists write in Nature, conditions in the atmosphere of Venus resemble those on earth more than anywhere else. In the lower Venusian clouds, they say, there is carbon dioxide, water and sunshine-prerequisites for photosynthesis. The temperatures are chilly, but above freezing. If small amounts of minerals were stirred up to the clouds from Venus' surface, the scientists believe that an indigenous biology-based entirely on biochemical principles observed on earth-could exist...
...they calculate, the organisms could range from the size of a pingpong ball to more complex and thicker-skinned gas spheres many times larger. Despite their internal hydrogen, Sagan jokes scientifically, there would be little danger of miniature Hindenburg disasters; there is little or no free oxygen in the Venusian atmosphere to support an explosion of hydrogen...