Word: mcdonald
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...second Apollo experiment also ran into difficulty. Astronomers at the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, Calif., and the Haleakala Observatory on Maui, Hawaii, were unable to locate the lunar reflector, an arrangement of 100 prisms that they hoped would reflect laser beams from earth. The beams were to be used as a precision measuring tool that would yield, among other things, the exact distance between earth and moon, proof of whether there is really any drift between continents and accurate figures on the earth's wobble. The major reason for the trouble...
...been contradicted by spectrographic studies of the Martian atmosphere. Although some of these studies have detected traces of water vapor, the evidence has not been distinct enough to be completely convincing to many scientists. Now all doubts have apparently been erased. A team of astronomers working at the McDonald Observatory in Texas announced last week that they had obtained the first "absolutely conclusive proof" of water vapor on Mars...
...scientists had previously used in attempts to detect Martian water: the telescope and the spectrograph, which breaks light into its rainbow (spectrum) of colors and records it on a photographic plate. With the aid of a $100,000 NASA grant, mirrors had just been refinished on the 82-in. McDonald telescope, bettering its focusing by a factor of three. The optics of the spectrograph had also been improved to enable astronomers to distinguish finer details of the dark absorption lines that would be produced in the spectrum by any moisture in the Martian atmosphere. On two of the nights...
Although the results do not prove the existence of water on the Martian surface, Astronomer Harlan Smith, director of the McDonald Observatory, speculates that if water is found in the atmosphere, it must be stored in greater quantities in the form of permafrost at the poles and in the ground...
...rapid to be detected by the human eye. The flashes corresponded exactly to the radio pulses from the Crab pulsar, strongly suggesting that the target was indeed the pulsar. Unlike an earlier and apparently erroneous sighting of a flashing pulsar (TIME, May 31), this discovery was confirmed by the McDonald Observatory in Texas and Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory...