Venus Probed

If a super-powerful telescope had been trained on the morning star last week, it might have seen a tiny, spidery object all vanes and antennae, creep slowly past the blazing crescent of Venus. This was the U.S. space-probe Mariner II. For more than four months it had drifted away from the earth, coasting down a long ellipse toward the orbit of Venus. Its radio voice grew faint as the miles multiplied into millions, then into tens of millions. But it was never too faint heard by anxious scientists at Goldstone station in the Mojave Desert.

Command Control. For months, the world watched Mariner II. Careful measurements showed that it would pass about 21,000 miles from the planet; but space, with its sucking vacuum, fierce radiation and gnawing micrometeoroids, is a hostile environment for man's machines. No one could be sure that when Mariner II made its dash past Venus it would be in shape to report what its instruments saw there.

One bad sign was the probe's temperature which climbed ominously higher as its elliptical orbit neared the sun. Nervously the scientists watched the faint telemetered reports of Mariner's thermometers. Just before the Venus-pass, Mariner reported a temperature dangerously close to the heat that would burst its batteries.

Inside the probe, a built-in timer had been programmed to turn on the mam instruments at the proper time. But that time passed, and no report of action came over the probe's radio voice. Then, 3 hr. 20 mins later, the built-in alarm clock got I second chance. But this time also it failed to awake the probe's instruments.

Word flashed to all the worlds space centers that Mariner II was in trouble. But all was not lost; at Goldstone the scientists pointed their great dish antenna with special precision and sent a radio command to Mariner II, 36 million miles away. The radio waves, traveling with the speed of light, took more than three minutes to get to their target. At last came the voice of Mariner II, reporting that it had heard the command and turned on its instruments.

Alien Planet. The probe was already close to Venus when it opened its instrument eyes: an infra-red and a microwave detector. Both of them worked perfectly. Instantly Mariner's radio came alive and began relaying the secrets of Venus to earth, where they were typed in code. In Washington a spokesman for the --Aeronautics and Space Administration announced jubilantly: "We are currently scanning and gathering data from the planet." Then the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, which built Manner II, relayed its actual voice--an eerie, organ-like music. It would take several weeks to turn the signals into information about he temperature, mass, atmosphere and magnetic field of Venus, but the scientists of JPL were already justly triumphant. For the first time man had made close contact with an alien planet. Said Britain's famous radio astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell who had been following Mariner II toward Venus with the great telescope at Jodrell Bank: "This is by far the most splendid scientific achievement in space."

Another ambitious U.S. space project was in questionable shape at week's end The Relay communication satellite built by Radio Corp. of America for NASA was launched into orbit, with its high point 4,612 miles above the earth and an Sing time of 3 hr. 5 min. Relay was expected to start carrying voice communications between the continents on its fifth orbit, but something happened to its power supply. Telemetering told that the was low, so scientists did not turn on the main transmitter. The voltage continued to drop, and at week's end NASA scientist announced that attempts to make contact with the satellite had been postponed indefinitely.

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