Word: venusized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Next week, if all goes well, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will launch Mariner 5, a $30 million spacecraft designed to shoot past Venus at a distance of only 2,000 miles and probe the mysteries of the cloud-shrouded planet during its flyby. Whatever its findings, however, Mariner will hardly be able to top the recent accomplishment of astronomers in a plane flying only 37,000 feet above the earth. Using an ingenious scheme and sophisticated equipment, they determined conclusively that Venus is a bone-dry planet devoid of water-and probably devoid of any kind of life...
Even after Mariner 2 determined in 1962 that the surface temperature of Venus was about 800° F., some scientists expressed the hope that life might exist on its cooler mountaintops or among the water clouds and ice crystals believed to exist in the Venusian atmosphere. But the yellow hue of Venusian clouds has long caused University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, 61, to doubt that they were composed of water in any form...
...keeping a gyroscopically-controlled mirror pointed directly at Venus through a port in the plane's roof the scientists were able to deflect the planet's reflected light continuously for more than an hour into the telescope, which was mounted horizontally inside the plane. During this time, they obtained 2,000 separate patterns of Venusian light on an interferometer-a device that splits a beam of light, sends each half along a path of different length, and then rejoins them in an interference pattern of light and dark fringes. Computer analysis and averaging of these patterns by scientists...
Desolate Planet. To cancel out the effects of any water vapor in the portion of the earth's atmosphere still above them, the airborne astronomers had also taken about 1,000 interferograms of the moon, which was close to Venus in the sky during the flight. Although the moon is known to be dry, the lunar spectrograms produced by the Block computers also showed evidence of a trace of water vapor. The vapor, the scientists knew, had been detected not on the moon but in the earth's atmosphere. Thus, by eliminating the same proportion of terrestrial vapor...
...Broadway YOU KNOW I CAN'T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER'S RUNNING. Some people envisage sex as a noble Venus. Others picture it as a mischievous Cupid. Some think it inspiring, others downright funny. In his four playlets, Robert Anderson uses it to tease, to tickle and to touch his audience, at times moving them to laughter and at times to tears...