Word: solarized
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...innermost planet of the solar system, Mercury is almost always obscured by the sun's harsh glare. Under the best viewing conditions, it never appears as more than a hazy disk in earth-bound telescopes. Last week, as the Mariner 10 passed only 400 miles from the planet, some of the mystery about Mercury was finally dispelled. Radioing back the first close-up pictures of the Mercurian surface, the robot ship unveiled a bleak, cratered and totally forbidding world...
...spin was faster. The presence of an atmosphere is equally difficult to explain because the planet's gravity is too weak to prevent a gaseous envelope from escaping into space. But, says Project Scientist James A. Dunne, some gases could be continually trapped from the stream of solar particles or released from within the planet by the slow decay of radioactive elements...
Astronauts will not return to space until the joint U.S.-Russian venture in 1975. But last week unmanned robot craft were ranging far and wide across the solar system on missions of planetary exploration. NASA announced that Pioneer 11, already three-quarters of the way to Jupiter, will proceed to Saturn and provide the first close-up look at the ringed planet. From Mars, an orbiting Soviet spacecraft sent back new, detailed views of the Martian surface. At week's end, fresh from its reconnaissance of cloud-shrouded Venus, Mariner 10, now nearing Mercury, began transmitting its first pictures...
...space agency's approval of a mission to Saturn will require a course change that will send the craft whipping by Jupiter at a distance of only 26,000 miles. Accelerated by Jovian gravity, Pioneer 11 will then be flung across the solar system for a rendezvous with Saturn in September 1979. The new flight plan was decided upon only after careful analysis of Pioneer 10's performance last December; it came within 81,000 miles of Jupiter's cloudtops and was subjected to an intense bombardment of charged particles from Jupiter's radiation belts. Pioneer...
Like the moon, Mercury apparently has no appreciable atmosphere or magnetic field. Its surface, bombarded by intense solar radiation, may be quite dusty. Recently, radar astronomers suggested that Mercury has mountains as high as 4,000 ft., rolling hills and valleys, and some lunar-like craters, some of them perhaps of volcanic origin. Surface temperatures are far more extreme than those on either the moon or Mars. At the height of the Mercurian day, they may reach 940° F., more than enough to melt lead. At night they plunge to - 350° F. No living things could be expected...