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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Sept. 19, 1962
Sight To Match Danger For Venus Astronaut
WASHINGTON — (UPI) — For an astronaut, the 109-day journey to Venus on which Mariner II is so brilliantly embarked would be a terribly lonely and perilous venture.
It also would be an introduction to beauty and grandeur on a scale hardly imaginable.
The Mariner astronaut would see the magnificent slow-motion dance of the sun's sky-filling coronal streamers, the luminous and seemingly endless ocean of the Zodiacal light, and a blinding closeup of the great shining globe of Venus.
Mariner II left Cape Canaveral, Fla., Aug. 27 on a 180.2 million mile voyage to the outskirts of Venus, the "twin of earth" in the family of planets which wheels perpetually around the sun.
CLIMAX OF THE flight will be a 30-minute period on Dec. 14 when Mariner passes across the sunlit face of Venus only 9,000 miles from the brightest and most mysterious of Earth's near planetary neighbors.
The 447-ib. Mariner, resembling a miniature oil derrick with flaps, is the most intricate and gifted spacecraft ever launched. It carries instruments which should tell us, on Dec. 14, whether life is possible on the cloud-masked planet whose surface has never been seen by man.
Direct descendants of Mariner 11 some time in the 1970's will carry even better instruments — the eyes and mind of a human pilot. But for this pioneering venture there was no room aboard for a man.
NEVERTHELESS, many an astronomer would be glad to risk his life to see what Mariner II's eyeless instruments can only infer. Given a picture window looking out on solar space, what might a human observer see and feel on the way to Venus?
If he looked sharp, he might have seen the blue horizons of earth described by astronauts John H. Glenn Jr. and M. Scott Carpenter. A minute later he might have seen simultaneous auroral flashes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
Pulling free of the earth's gravitational domination, thousands of miles out into space, a backward glance would reveal a monster gray-blue globe little resembling the green earth he had left.
WHEN THE ASTRONAUT had got as far from the earth as the moon, what he saw might give him a shock — the lovely globular earth at that distance might resemble a giant tadpole with a tail of luminous gas streaming behind the planet under the pressure of the solar wind like a comet's tenuous appendage.
ROCK CHALK REVUE
Tryouts for Staff Positions
Although previous experience is in every case more than desirable, such experience is definitely not a prerequisite to be considered for any given staff position.
For Application
Deadline Wednesday September 26 at 5:00 P.M.
Send a personal letter stating previous experience with the revue or with a similar activity or other qualifications to the KU-Y office in the Student Union before
First Fallout Shelter For Kansas City
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The international headquarters building of Hallmark Cards, Inc., has been licensed as the first public fallout shelter here, under President Kennedy's new Federal Shelter program.
The nine-story contemporary structure could accommodate 25,000 persons in an emergency, Civil Defense officials said.
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