Word: venusized
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...Moons. Although at its closest Mariner was still 21,000 miles away from Venus, a human observer riding the spacecraft would have seen a spectacular sight. Even from 500,000 miles, Venus would be a crescent twice as high as the crescent moon. Because of its high reflectivity and nearness to the sun, it would be much brighter than any moon. As Mariner II swept nearer, its rider would have seen the crescent, growing and thickening, its glare waxing blindingly bright, until it was 35 times the diameter of the full moon as seen from the earth and more than...
While the earth turned on its daily round and Mariner II cruised toward Venus, JPL's three great radio dishes, at Johannesburg, South Africa, Woomera, Australia, and Goldstone, Calif., picked up Mariner's reports. They were received as a quavering, singsong radio signal, then translated by a computer into an endless series of letters printed on a broad band of paper. Out of the apparently meaningless melange of characters, Mariner men in JPL's control room deciphered their spacecraft's chatter...
During the triumphant flyby, some of the messages read clearly, telling that the instruments were working well and observing Venus properly. But at other times, the code was jumbled. Apparently two faraway instruments were trying to talk at once. So the necessary parts of a duplicate Mariner were set up in a laboratory and made to observe, in effect, a simulated Venus. When the lab instruments also talked out of turn, they gave a key for disentangling the mixed-up messages from Mariner 'II. These tediously deciphered reports are what were made public last week...
...Over. Mariner's instruments scanned Venus three times, crossing first the dark side, then the boundary between light and dark, and finally the sunlit side. The microwave radiometer reported a surface temperature of about 800° F. (melting point of lead: 621.5° F.), which seems to vary hardly at all over the whole planet, dark side as well as light side. It showed no detectable water vapor...
...leading theories about the Venusian atmosphere: that it is highly ionized on top and therefore glows, making the planet appear hotter than it really is. Such an atmosphere would be brighter at the edges than in the center, and since the Venusian atmosphere does not show this, Venus can have no shell of ions to hide a temperate surface behind a glowing screen...