Word: venusians
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...million miles of space, the spherical Venera 8, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and a portrait of Lenin, plummeted toward the thin, sunlit crescent of Venus that is now visible from earth. Under its heat-resistant parachute, the 2,600-lb. spacecraft floated down through the thick, hot Venusian atmosphere. After it landed, it continued sending signals for about 50 minutes before it burned out on the scalding Venusian surface...
Molten Pools. Venera was also equipped with a gamma-ray detector that should provide the first on-site evidence as to the composition and structure of the Venusian "soil." That evidence is not likely to be very inviting. As late as the 1950s, many astronomers still thought that conditions on cloud-shrouded Venus might favor life, but by now they know otherwise. Rotating once every 243 days in a direction opposite to that of the other planets, Venus has a surface that University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper says might resemble a fresh volcanic field, with boiling sulfur springs...
...mission to the moon, word of a remarkable Soviet achievement raised further doubts about U.S. emphasis on costly and risky manned space flights. In Moscow, Russian scientists belatedly revealed that the unmanned space probe Venera 7, which reached Venus on Dec. 15, had survived its descent through the murky Venusian atmosphere and continued to function after landing. Its radio transmissions carried the first scientific data to be transmitted to earth from the surface of another planet...
Initially, the momentum of the errant moon would have carried it beyond Venus. Then, as Venusian gravity pulled it back, it would have again sped by the planet-but this time not so far out into space. Eventually, as the tidal forces between the two bodies increased during this strange celestial courtship, the moon would have been drawn into an increasingly smaller orbit around the planet. At the same time, Venus' spin would have been greatly retarded and eventually reversed; the planet's surface would also have become searingly hot from the friction of the tidal movements...
...experiment with a little-known, foul-smelling liquid called carbon suboxide (C3O2). As the physicists increased its temperature, the compound solidified and underwent a series of color changes from pale yellow to orange, reddish brown, purple and a shade approaching black. Although the yellow vaguely resembled the tint of Venusian clouds, the range of colors was far more suggestive of the surface of Mars, which undergoes still unexplained variations in shading and color. Furthermore, spectroscopic studies of carbon suboxide produced results closely resembling those obtained from the reflected light of Mars...