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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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1970
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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>
<p>(March 6, 1972)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(December 25, 1972)
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p>(April 23, 1973)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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).
</p>
<p>(February 11, 1974)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(April 8, 1974)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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).
</p>
<p> ["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.
</p>
<p>-- Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686]
</p>
<p>(November 3, 1975)
</p>
<p> 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?
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(August 2, 1976)
</p>
<p> 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).
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(March 19, 1979)
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(September 17, 1979)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>