Word: venusized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that December day, though, the morning star held a special attraction for the men of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Almost as if they could see it all happening, they squinted into 36 million miles of space, out into the vicinity of Venus, where for the first time in history a man-made space traveler was cruising into range. A gold and gleaming machine, sporting angular purple wings and unblinking electronic eyes, was swooping toward its target. Mariner II was giving earthbound scientists their first close look at the distant planet that has tugged so long at their adventurous...
Would the morning star live up to the romance of science and turn out to be teeming with life? Were there, as some romanticists confidently expected, forests of intelligent, moving trees? Or would Mariner prove the accuracy of some of the glummer theories of radio astronomy -that Venus is a barren ball covered with a dull layer of dust? Last week JPL's boss, New Zealand-born Physicist William Hayward Pickering, brought his Mariner team to Washington to deliver a batch of decoded data containing the first series of answers...
They were not calculated to delight space fictioneers. Although such respected astronomers as Harvard's Harlow Shapley and Britain's Sir Bernard Lovell have speculated that there may be hundreds of millions of heavenly bodies capable of supporting life, Mariner's sensitive instruments testified that Venus does not rate a place on the long list. It appears to be hot and dry and dead. If there is any life at all-a doubtful possibility at best-it must float as dustlike microorganisms in comparatively cool clouds...
...Life. Only a few years ago, any meaningful voyage to Venus would have been impossible. Spacemanship of such a high order involves the creation of clever mechanical beasts that can live and function for months in a hostile environment beyond Earth's atmosphere. They must obey commands from millions of miles away, a requirement that calls for radio techniques of incredible delicacy. Giant computers, only recently developed, must plot celestial courses, and enormous vacuum chambers are needed to test behavior in simulated space. These strange space creatures are almost a new type of life, comparable in zoological terms...
...Pickering never lost his composure. "I had to establish," he says in measured tones, "that the project could get the necessary support from the laboratory, and that we could redesign the spacecraft down to what Atlas-Agena could carry. We finally decided that we could go gung-ho for Venus. When all this looked as if it were making sense, NASA said. 'Charge...