Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dust settled, Mariner's cameras revealed a fascinating landscape: towering volcanoes, great canyons, lava flows and a multitude of craters in the red- hued plains. What excited scientists and Mars buffs the most, however, was the unmistakable traces of dry riverbeds and deltas etched into the rock, evidence that water had once flowed freely on the Martian surface. Had life evolved on Mars while water was still ample? And might living organisms still exist there, perhaps in microscopic form...
...part to answer such questions that the U.S. Viking 1 and 2 spacecraft, each consisting of an orbiter and a lander, were dispatched to Mars. When they arrived, 45 days apart, in 1976, cameras aboard the orbiters snapped away and remote-sensing devices searched for water vapor in the thin atmosphere and sought out frozen water in the polar ice caps. On the surface, the landers began providing the most accurate measurements yet of Martian surface temperatures, atmospheric density and wind velocity, while the cameras shot more than 4,500 spectacular close-up pictures of the surrounding, rock- strewn landscape...
...flurry of speculation among scientists on earth. Did the oxygen come from some tiny form of Martian life in the soil? After further tests failed to confirm those first results, scientists reluctantly concluded that the large amount of oxygen had probably been produced by a simple chemical reaction between water vapor and some unidentified oxygen-rich compound in the soil sample...
Some scientists, Soviet and American alike, have still not abandoned hope of finding life or its remnants deeper in the Martian soil. There life forms might have access to water and be protected from the fierce solar ultraviolet radiation that rains down on the surface, virtually unobstructed by the Martian atmosphere. Sedimentary rocks in the ancient riverbeds would be an ideal place to hunt for fossils of organisms that may have lived when Mars was more benign, with a thicker atmosphere, warmer climate and running water on its surface...
...walls of a spacecraft and fatally riddle the body of an astronaut in half an hour, planners envision an onboard shelter into which the crew could repair as soon as a solar-flare warning was sounded. One idea is to build the shelter with the heavy-walled oxygen and water tanks that must be brought along anyway. Soviet scientists are experimenting with generating strong electrically charged fields around the spacecraft. These would have an effect similar to that of the earth's magnetic field, deflecting the speeding particles around the ship...