Word: venusized
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While the U.S. space program has concentrated on the exploration of the moon and Mars, Soviet scientists have trained their sights on cloud-enshrouded Venus. Since 1961, Russia has launched at least ten missions to Venus, most of them intended to land instrumented packages on the surface of the planet; by comparison, the U.S. has undertaken only two less ambitious flyby probes. The persistent Soviet effort has paid off. After careful analysis of data from Venera 8, which transmitted signals for 50 minutes after making a landing in July, Russian scientists have lifted still more of the veil from...
...least part of the surface is similar to the earth's. Venera's gamma-ray spectrometer determined that the landing area contained radioactive potassium, uranium and thorium in approximately the same ratio in which they appear in many volcanic rocks on earth. This, in turn, indicates that Venus, like the earth, Mars and the moon, is "differentiated"; that is, the planet was once hot enough for its material to soften and flow. During this period, the heavier elements settled toward the core while the lighter ones, taking radioactive elements with them, rose to the surface to form...
...nobody seemed prepared for what appeared when Conductor Erich Leinsdorf lowered his baton for the overture. Tenor Hugh Beresford wandered over a barren wooden platform; instead of a balletic orgy, there was a huge human brain populated with frightening, dim figures miming psychiatric problems ranging from infantilism to sadomasochism. Venus arrived looking like a Reeperbahn stripper...
...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 and red-hot pools...
Because it is the second planet from the sun, Venus is exposed to about twice as much solar radiation as the earth. But this proximity alone does not account for the high Venusian temperature. While its carbon-dioxide atmosphere lets in the sun's radiation, it also keeps in the heat (infrared rays) given off from the planet's surface, thus creating a "greenhouse effect." Furthermore, as the temperature rises, more carbon dioxide is boiled into the atmosphere, only to increase the effect...