Word: venusians
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...relatively close one at that. In 1972, the space agency will send two Pioneer spacecraft on a flyby of Jupiter, largest planet in the solar system. A year later, another Mariner will try the first multiple-planet probe. After a sweep of Venus, it will use the Venusian gravity to boost itself on toward Mercury, the sun's closest and smallest satellite. In the late 1970s, the so-called "outer planets" will be so favorably aligned that a spacecraft passing Jupiter could use its gravity to push on toward Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -a "grand tour" that would cover...
...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...
...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...
When Russia's Venus 4 capsule suddenly fell silent in the thick Venusian atmosphere last October, Soviet scientists assumed that the spacecraft's final readings-a temperature of 520° F. and an atmospheric pressure 15 to 22 times greater than Earth's-described conditions on the planet's surface. Not so, say U.S. Electrical Engineers Arvydas Kliore and Dan Cain. The Venusian at mosphere, they report in the current issue of Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, is much hotter and far more crushing than the Soviets think. On the surface the temperature is actually close...
...radar installations have established that the planet's radius is only 3,759 miles. That means that at the instant Venus 4 stopped transmitting, it must have been 15 miles above the planet's surface. The capsule, Kliore and Cain speculate, may have landed on a Venusian mountain three times as high as Mount Everest. Or more likely, it may have gone dead while still floating down through the atmosphere-a victim of electronic heat prostration. To back up their temperature estimate, the JPL men also point out that U.S. radio astronomy measurements and data from Mariner...