Word: venusized
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...Apollo 14 astronauts went through final preparations last week for their 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...
Venera 7 remained alive for 23 minutes on the hostile surface of Venus, confirming what data from earlier U.S. and Soviet probes had suggested: that the temperature stayed about 900° F. and that atmospheric pressure was around 90 times as high as terrestrial sea-level pressure. Then Venera fell silent, its instruments presumably cooked by the intense heat. That the craft survived as long as it did was a testimonial to the increasing sophistication of the Soviet space program. Venera 7 was the 17th Soviet mission to Venus.* Although the last three probes were on target, deployed parachutes...
Most scientists have attributed the peculiar spin of Venus to huge tidal bulges created long ago on the surface of the planet by the sun's gravitational field. Such bulges would have acted like brake shoes on the rim of a flywheel; eventually they could have slowed the planet's rotation and perhaps even reversed it. Singer, the Interior Department's deputy assistant secretary for scientific programs, considers this explanation totally inadequate. The solar tidal effect, he says in Science, would have been far too small to account for even Venus' current rate of rotation, only...
...orbit around the sun by many moonlike bodies. Because only one of these ancient "moons" remains (the earth's), it seems quite likely that most of the others eventually collided with the planets. Singer dismisses the possibility that a direct hit by a moon could have reversed Venus' spin; the moon would have been much too small. But his calculations indicate that a near miss by a moon traveling counter to the direction of Venus' rotation might have turned the trick...
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...