Word: venusized
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Never before in man's history has he stood nearer his celestial neighbors. Powerful radio telescopes collect emissions from the very lip of infinity. Inquisitive hardware, sent up from earth, skims past the moon, Venus, Mars, the sun. The space sciences, in their long climb from superstition, have developed an impressive and reliable exactitude. Yet for more than 20 million U.S. newspaper readers, the true word from space is handed down daily by a group of occultists turned journalists, who practice a black art older than Babylon...
...super-powerful telescope had been trained on the morning star last week, it might have seen a tiny, spidery object all vanes and antennae, creep slowly past the blazing crescent of Venus. This was the U.S. space-probe Mariner II. For more than four months it had drifted away from the earth, coasting down a long ellipse toward the orbit of Venus. Its radio voice grew faint as the miles multiplied into millions, then into tens of millions. But it was never too faint heard by anxious scientists at Goldstone station in the Mojave Desert...
...Mariner II. Careful measurements showed that it would pass about 21,000 miles from the planet; but space, with its sucking vacuum, fierce radiation and gnawing micrometeoroids, is a hostile environment for man's machines. No one could be sure that when Mariner II made its dash past Venus it would be in shape to report what its instruments saw there...
...sign was the probe's temperature which climbed ominously higher as its elliptical orbit neared the sun. Nervously the scientists watched the faint telemetered reports of Mariner's thermometers. Just before the Venus-pass, Mariner reported a temperature dangerously close to the heat that would burst its batteries...
Alien Planet. The probe was already close to Venus when it opened its instrument eyes: an infra-red and a microwave detector. Both of them worked perfectly. Instantly Mariner's radio came alive and began relaying the secrets of Venus to earth, where they were typed in code. In Washington a spokesman for the -Aeronautics and Space Administration announced jubilantly: "We are currently scanning and gathering data from the planet." Then the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, which built Manner II, relayed its actual voice-an eerie, organ-like music. It would take several weeks to turn the signals...