Word: venusians
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...slowly through the atmosphere and made a soft landing. Prechilled in the coldness of space, the probe's instruments survived 53 minutes on the torrid surface-three minutes longer than the last Russian lander. They radioed a flood of data, including the first photographic image of the hidden Venusian landscape-a jumble of large jagged rocks rather than the sandy desert expected by some experts. Said Project Scientist Boris Nepoklonov: "We thought there couldn't be rocks on Venus [because] they would all be annihilated by constant wind and temperature erosion, but here they are, with edges absolutely...
...last U.S. craft to venture near Venus was Mariner 10; it took the first closeup pictures of the Venusian clouds in February 1974 en route to the sun's innermost planet, Mercury. In 1978 NASA hopes to launch an equally ambitious probe. A Pioneer spacecraft will drop five separate exploratory packages into Venus' atmosphere-provided, of course, that budget cutters do not kill the mission before it gets off the ground...
Guarded as usual, the Russians said only that Venera 9 and 10 were a "new type of spacecraft" that would make scientific explorations of Venus and its environment. Western observers expected the ships to attempt soft landings on the scalding Venusian surface, where the temperature is more than 1,000° F.-hot enough to melt lead-and atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of the earth's at sea level...
Close Look. The four-hour flyby was an unexpected bonus at the end of an already successful $100 million mission. Three months after its launch in November 1973, Mariner 10 passed Venus and took the first closeup pictures of the cloud-shrouded planet. Then slowed by Venusian gravity, it plunged toward the sun, approaching Mercury in March and again in September 1974. On those flybys, Mariner got the first close look at the planet and detected a weak magnetic field that some scientists thought might be caused by Mercury's interaction with the solar wind, a stream of charged...
...Secrets. Even as Mariner 10 approached Mercury (it was only 3.3 million miles away at week's end) U.S. scientists were examining the 3,500 pictures of Venus transmitted to earth by the spacecraft in February. Among other things, the computer-clarified photographs showed that 1) the thick Venusian clouds move 60 times as fast as the rotational velocity of the planet; 2) the Venusian poles are ringed by bright, most likely cooler regions; and 3) a huge "eye"-a break in the thick cloud cover -seems to have opened in the equatorial region, probably because of circulation effects...