TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1970s) Space </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 05586> <link 05248> <link 02175> <link 00196><link 00207><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Space </hdr> <body> (March 6, 1972) Scheduled to begin this week, the journey will be the most spectacular ever undertaken from earth: an odyssey of two years and half a billion miles--including a hazardous stretch through the asteroid belt--to fly to within 87,000 miles of the planet Jupiter. If all goes well, the unmanned ship--Pioneer 10--will radio back the first closeup pictures of the giant planet, probe its intense magnetic fields and radiation belts and perhaps peek at one of the twelve Jovian moons. Then with the planet's powerful gravity acting as a slingshot, Pioneer will be hurled beyond Jupiter to begin the first voyage of a manmade spacecraft out of the solar system. To Cornell Astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, Pioneer's flight into interstellar space is not only a scientific adventure but a rare opportunity. Thus they persuaded NASA to attach a unique plaque to Pioneer's antenna supports. Its purpose: to indicate where the far-ranging robot came from and who its builders were should Pioneer ever be intercepted by extraterrestrial beings. To assure its preservation, the plaque has been anodized with erosion-resistant gold. What is more, the symbols etched into it have been designed to be meaningful even to beings totally unfamiliar with human logical processes. As their central illustration, Sagan and Drake--helped by Sagan's wife Linda, an artist--chose figures of two representative earthlings. Their height is indicated by the scale drawing of Pioneer in the background. The message's most ingenious feature, however, is the large starburst pattern. Fourteen of the lines symbolize specific pulsars, each with recognizable by the precise frequency (also noted in binary terms) at which they give off radio signals. The 15th line, extending behind the humans, indicates the distance of their star to the center of the galaxy. That information should tell extraterrestrial scientists even a million years from now when and from where the spacecraft was launched. (December 25, 1972) "We leave as we came and, God willing, we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind." As he uttered those hopeful and heartfelt words, Apollo 17's commander, Gene Cernan, stepped from the surface of the moon and clambered up the ladder of lunar module Challenger. Cernan's departure may not be remembered as long as Neil Armstrong's historic arrival three years ago. Nonetheless it was a profound and moving moment that was put in perspective by a presidential pronouncement: "This may be the last time in this century," said Richard Nixon, "that men will walk on the moon." Next day millions of TV viewers on earth watched as Challenger, in a dramatic pyrotechnic display, lifted off from the moon's mountain-rimmed Taurus-Littrow valley. In terms of its scientific payoff, the last Apollo mission will probably turn out to be the best. During their record 22 hours outside their moonship, Cernan and Schmitt collected some 250 lbs. of lunar rocks, more than any of the ten moonwalkers before them. They set up the moon's fifth scientific station and drove their battery-powered rover across 22.5 miles of the cratered valley. They took more than 2,000 photographs, and turned up what may well be the first positive evidence of relatively recent volcanic activity on the moon. Said Schmitt, the first scientist to walk the moon: "This valley has seen mankind complete his first evolutionary steps in the universe. I think no more significant contribution has Apollo made to history." (April 23, 1973) It is the largest, most complex spacecraft ever built. Stretching 118 ft. from end to end, it weighs 100 tons, and has the interior space and most of the comforts of a three-bedroom house: private sleeping compartments for its three passengers, a dining table, a shower, a lavatory larger than any commercial airliner's and an 18-in. porthole to provide a view of the earth. To sustain its crew, it carries 720 gal. of drinking water, more than 2,000 lbs. of food and enough scientific and medical gear for months of experimentation. Both inside and out, it would make a splendid set for a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey or the TV series called Star Trek. But it is a real spacecraft called Skylab, which will soon become the U.S.'s first manned orbital space station. Skylab is scheduled to be launched from Cape Kennedy on May 14 atop a giant Saturn 5 booster and sent into a 269-mile-high orbit of the earth. Next day, a smaller Saturn 1-B rocket will loft an Apollo command ship with three astronauts on board into a similar orbital path around the earth. Seven hours later, the astronauts will rendezvous and dock with Skylab. The men will then move into posh quarters and prepare to remain there for the next 28 days--four days longer than the previous record set in 1971 by the Russians in the more primitive Salyut I space station. Later in the year, two more three-man crews will board the orbiting ship, each group remaining in space for 56 days. Total cost of the three missions: $2.5 billion. In addition to making astronomical sightings from their unique platform above the earth's obscuring atmosphere, the astronauts will perform a host of scientific tasks, ranging from observation of the earth to tests of the effects of weightlessness on molten metals. But the most important scientific observations and experiments will be those that determine how the astronauts react physically to living in space. Under the direction of Kerwin, who will be the first U.S. medical doctor in space, the astronauts will use a bicycle exerciser (to check for changes in their metabolism), place themselves in a rotating chair (motion sickness and general disorientation) and crawl into a cylindrical chamber that looks like an iron lung (cardiovascular system). (February 11, 1974) When Skylab's third and last team of astronauts lands in the Pacific off lower California this week, after a record 84 days in earth orbit, a good deal more than an extraordinary successful mission will be coming to an end. Except for next year's scheduled space rendezvous between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, there are no plans to send anyone from the U.S. into orbit before the close of the decade. Friday's splashdown conclude not only the ambitious $2.6 billion Skylab program but an entire era of space exploration. The final voyage set records that should last for years. If all goes well, Astronauts Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Edward Gibson will have traveled 34 1/2 million miles in the 1,214 revolutions around the earth, made four long space walks and watched the sun rise and set more than 1,300 times. Magnetic tapes holding scientific data about the earth alone could stretch for 19 miles. As Skylab ended, the future of the U.S. manned space program looks bleak. In fact something of a brain drain has already begun. Reversing a flow of talent that brought Wernher Von Braun and other top German rocket experts to the U.S. after World War II, unemployed American specialists are trickling abroad to take jobs in Western Europe's now budding space efforts. (April 8, 1974) As the 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 earthbound telescopes. Last week, as the Mariner 10 passed only 400 miles from the planet, some of they 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. "It's like the moon and it isn't," said Donald E. Gault, one of the scientists monitoring the Mariner data at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. The pictures showed that Mercury's craters are much flatter and thinner-rimmed than the moon's and resemble giant pie pans--an indication that they may have been worn down by some yet-to-be-identified erosional process. The biggest surprise was the discovery of a weak magnetic field (only 1% as strong as the earth's) and an extremely thin atmosphere of helium, argon and perhaps other gases (less than 0.1% as dense as the earth's). ["I can tell from here...what the inhabitants of Venus are like; they resemble the Moors of Granada; a small, black people, burned by the sun, full of wit and fire, always in love, writing verse, fond of music, arranging festivals, dances and tournaments every day. -- Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686] (November 3, 1975) After reconnoitering cloud-covered Venus with eight separate unmanned spacecraft--three American and five Russian, including two Soviet landing vehicles--scientists are now certain that DeFontenelle's Eden is, in fact, more like Dante's Inferno. Its surface temperature is a hellish 900 degree F. Its atmosphere, consisting largely of carbon dioxide, is at least 90 times as thick as the earth's, producing crushing surface pressures of 1,500 lbs. per sq. in. Its clouds are laden with sulfuric acid. Yet a major mystery remains: Why has a planet so like the earth in size, mass and density evolved in such a dramatically different way? Hoping to answer that planetary puzzle, the Soviets last June launched two more unmanned spacecraft, Venera (Venus) 9 and 10. Last week, after arcing across 186 million miles of space, the first of the probes approached its target and released a small lander, emblazoned with hammer and sickle. After deploying a balloon-like French-designed parachute system, the vehicle descended slowly through the atmosphere and made a soft landing. Prechilled in the coolness of space, the probe's instruments survived 53 minutes on the torrid surface--three minutes longer than the last Russian lander. They radioed a flood of data, including the first photographic image of the hidden Venusian landscape--a jumble of large jagged rocks rather than the sandy desert expected by some experts. While the lander transmitted its historic picture, the first from another planet's surface, the mother ship swung into orbit around Venus to become its first satellite (Venus has no known natural moons) and continued to transmit information on its environment. At week's end, Moscow announced that Venera 10 had repeated its twin's triumph. (August 2, 1976) For centuries, in fiction as well as in fact, men have dreamed about going to Mars and exploring the Red Planet. Last week, on July 20, at 8:12 a.m. (E.D.T.)--seven years to the day after the first men walked on the moon--this dream became a reality. "Touchdown! We have touchdown!" shouted Project Manager James S. Martin Jr. as he watched the consoles at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Only 17 sec. behind schedule, the lander was safely down on Mars' Chryse Planitia (golden plains). Like an apprehensive human who had plummeted from the sky onto alien soil, Viking first looked down at its footing, transmitting back to Pasadena the historic, if not dramatic first picture from the Martian surface. It showed one of the lander's round footpads resting upon an area of hard-packed soil strewn with pebbles and small rocks of varying sizes. At J.P.L., 212 million miles away, scientist could clearly see the rows of rivets on the lander's foot, late (Martian) afternoon shadows and--extending from rocks--dirt tails that might have been formed by the strong winds that frequently scour the planet's surface. It was when Viking lifted its gaze and surveyed the landscape that man could really imagine standing on Chryse Planitia. "Terrific!" exclaimed the Viking scientists. "Fantastic!" There before them in a spectacular 300 degree panoramic view was a rock-strewn--and apparently lifeless--plain reminiscent of the deserts of Arizona and northern Mexico. Clearly visible were bright patches of sand and dunes, some low ridges, what seemed to be an eroded crater and a landscape littered with rocks. Above the horizon, the Martian sky looked surprisingly bright--evidence, say some scientists, that the atmosphere is richer than expected in light-diffusing particles. In the sky was a shadow--perhaps a cloud composed of water vapor. The illusion of standing on the Martian plain became even more vivid when scientists produced a color picture that confirmed the appropriateness of Mars' long-time sobriquet of Red Planet. The soil seemed to consist of a fine-grained reddish material interspersed with small blue-black or blue-green patches. Many of the rocks were also coated with a reddish stain, strongly suggesting the presence of iron that had rusted in the presence of atmospheric or waterbound oxygen. (March 19, 1979) As Voyager curved around the sun's largest planet at speeds up to 104,600 km (65,000 miles) per hour, the craft performed nearly flawlessly its probing eyes and instruments shifting between Jupiter and its moons. As one startling picture after another flashed onto the screens at Caltech's Jet propulsion Laboratory, even Cornell's irrepressible Carl Sagan was left nearly speechless. Said he: "This is almost beyond interpretation. There's different chemistry, different physics, different forces at work out there." The close encounter lasted 39 tense hours, during which Voyager sent back enough data to fill up miles of magnetic tape and keep scientists busy for years ahead. As the center of a kind of mini-solar system, Jupiter is surrounded by at least 13 moons, and possibly a 14th. The four largest--Io, Europa, Ganymede and Calisto--are the so-called Galilean moons (named after their discoverer). Like the earth's moon, they are large enough to be considered small planets, but appeared as little more than fuzzy blobs in earth-bound telescopes. Now, Voyager's cameras have found that these moons are not only complex but also markedly different, their surfaces varying greatly in age, composition and appearance. Observed the U.S. Geological Survey's Laurence Soderblom: "There is no such thing as a boring Galilean moon." The most unexpected phenomenon, however, occurred when Voyager began detecting a stream of matter inside the orbit of Amalthea. Fortunately, mission controllers had preprogrammed the camera shutter to remain open for 11.2 minutes on the remote chance--no one took the possibility very seriously--that Jupiter had some kind of ring. To everyone's amazement, Voyager's time exposure produces a streaky image that the scientists could explain only as a ring of boulder-size debris. The findings seemed so unlikely that the NASA team delayed making the information public for several days while the data were checked and rechecked. Saturn was long the only planet known to have rings and considered to be the only one that could have them. In 1977 that theory was shattered with the discovery of rings around the planet Uranus. Jupiter itself was surveyed earlier by the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, but it is easy to see why no Jovian ring was found. Jupiter's is almost paper thin, perhaps 1 km (0.6 miles) high, and impossible to view from earth. (September 17, 1979) Battered and pitted from its encounter with the rings of Saturn, the Pioneer 11 spacecraft headed into deep space last week, its mission accomplished. In its sweep past Saturn, it had provided the best look yet at the solar system's second largest planet, discovered what is probably an eleventh Saturnian moon and two more rings. It also confirmed the existence of another ring and a magnetic field, and dimmed hopes that Titan, Saturn's largest moon, might harbor some form of life. Last week, as scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center near San Francisco skimmed data transmitted during the spacecraft's flyby of Saturn, they made an exciting discovery. While Pioneer was close to Saturn's rings, a detector recording a bombardment by charged particles fell practically silent for twelve seconds, then began registering particles again. Analysis indicated that Pioneer had been briefly shielded from the rain of particles as it flew under a massive object. Based on these readings and others that showed changes in the surrounding magnetic field, scientists concluded that the spacecraft had passed within about 2,500 km (1,560 miles) of what appears to be a previously undiscovered moon with a diameter as large as 600 km (370 miles). "The object was very close," says Physicist John Simpson of the University of Chicago. "It could be rocky or composed largely of high energy particles." The moonlet, in orbit about 90,000 km (56,000 miles) above Saturn's cloud tops, was nicknamed "Pioneer rock" by the scientists, and it is being officially designated as 1979 S-1. </body> </article> </text>