Word: venusians
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...well as to investigate surface conditions and other characteristics of cloud-covered Venus. Impressed by the weight of the Soviet craft-the heaviest ever sent to Venus-envious U.S. space experts speculated that it could be carrying a TV camera and a capsule capable of being ejected into the Venusian atmosphere and lowered to the surface-perhaps by parachute -in a soft-landing attempt...
...performed so effectively on earlier U.S. planetary probes. Unlike the last successful Venus shot-Mariner 2, which sailed within 21,600 miles of the planet in 1962 and sent back a surface temperature reading of 800° Fahrenheit, the newest Mariner may come close enough to detect a Venusian magnetic field-if it exists-and the equivalent of the earth's Van Allen radiation belts. It is also equipped to measure the density and temperature of the Venusian atmosphere, investigate the wake left by Venus as it plows through the solar wind, and provide new data on the mass...
Even after Mariner 2 determined in 1962 that the surface temperature of Venus was about 800° F., some scientists expressed the hope that life might exist on its cooler mountaintops or among the water clouds and ice crystals believed to exist in the Venusian atmosphere. But the yellow hue of Venusian clouds has long caused University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, 61, to doubt that they were composed of water in any form...
...Venus through a port in the plane's roof the scientists were able to deflect the planet's reflected light continuously for more than an hour into the telescope, which was mounted horizontally inside the plane. During this time, they obtained 2,000 separate patterns of Venusian light on an interferometer-a device that splits a beam of light, sends each half along a path of different length, and then rejoins them in an interference pattern of light and dark fringes. Computer analysis and averaging of these patterns by scientists at Block Associates in Cambridge, Mass., produced...
...showed evidence of a trace of water vapor. The vapor, the scientists knew, had been detected not on the moon but in the earth's atmosphere. Thus, by eliminating the same proportion of terrestrial vapor from the Venus spectrograms, they were able to determine the true amount of Venusian water vapor-approximately one-half of one-billionth of the Venusian atmosphere, compared with a vapor content of 1/400th of the atmosphere on earth...