Word: venus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After lonely, four-month journeys through the void, two ingeniously contrived spacecraft-one Russian, the other American-reached Venus last week. Methodically investigating the cloud-shrouded planet, they successfully radioed their findings back across 50 million miles of space to scientists on earth. The dual performance was perhaps the most impressive demonstration yet of the technical progress made by man during his first decade of space flight...
After four-month journeys through space, Russia's Venus 4 and the U.S. Mariner 5 spacecraft will both reach Venus this week. No matter what the space probes find, most scientists have already written off the possibility that Venusian life exists; the planet's apparent surface temperature is approximately 800° F., above the melting point of lead...
...Clouds. Of the planetary environments investigated so far by telescope and space probe, the scientists write in Nature, conditions in the atmosphere of Venus resemble those on earth more than anywhere else. In the lower Venusian clouds, they say, there is carbon dioxide, water and sunshine-prerequisites for photosynthesis. The temperatures are chilly, but above freezing. If small amounts of minerals were stirred up to the clouds from Venus' surface, the scientists believe that an indigenous biology-based entirely on biochemical principles observed on earth-could exist...
...critics who point out that it would be difficult for life to arise spontaneously in the atmosphere, Morowitz and Sagan have a ready answer: it did not. Instead, they postulate, ancient Venus had a much thinner atmosphere; its surface, now superheated by the greenhouse effect of a thick carbon-dioxide-filled atmosphere, was once cool enough to spawn life. As more gas was spewed into the atmosphere by volcanic action, however, the surface temperatures gradually became unbearable and could have driven the more buoyant organisms into the clouds, where they evolved and may well exist today...
...time she had finished bubbling and won her Oscar, Sandy's market value had more than doubled, to $125,000 a picture. A garden-variety Hollywood Venus would henceforth instruct her agent to go after only big-budget, reserved-seat extravaganzas and leading men of maximum candlepower. Not Sandy. Her concern is not the price but the property, not her image but her interest in the work. She settled on The Fox, based on a D. H. Lawrence novella, in which she plays a lesbian, hardly a career-booster...