Looking Up for Trouble

So long as man stays well down inside the atmosphere, he is protected from the buffetings of space. But what happens when he goes beyond this protection, as he probably soon will, in his high-flying airplanes and higher-flying rockets? For one thing, powerful cosmic rays will strike him oftener. Scientists have a lot to learn about cosmic rays, and much of what they already do know is carefully enfogged in military secrecy. But last week came two hints of what the scientists are up to.

Neutron Country. All winter, Dr. John Simpson of the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies flew back & forth between the northern U.S. and Lima, Peru, in a Navy Bag packed with special instruments. He was hunting neutrons, those subtle particles that slip into atomic nuclei and often disrupt them with bangs of radiation. He found plenty of neutrons. The higher he flew the more he found. They were not invaders from space, his studies told him, but were spattered out of atmospheric nuclei struck by cosmic rays.

In the temperate zone, Dr. Simpson found, the neutrons are thicker than in the tropics. This is because cosmic rays are charged particles (probably protons), and are therefore herded away from the equator by the earth's magnetic field. As Dr. Simpson's plane flew north, he could tell its latitude fairly accurately by his neutron-counting instruments. But he would not say whether variations in the "neutron field" could be used to steer guided missiles around the earth. "This question," he said, "is being investigated."

Meteor Measuring. B295 cannot fly above the effective top of the atmosphere, and rockets, so far, have not stayed up long enough to be thoroughly bombarded by free-striking cosmic rays. But meteors have been cruising through space without atmospheric protection for millions, perhaps billions, of years. If examined soon after they hit the earth, they should show the worst that cosmic rays can do.

So when a big, detonating "fireball" from space streaked across the Midwest last Feb. 18, the Chicago Institute for Nuclear Studies wanted a sample of it, and Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, meteorite hunter of the University of New Mexico, set out to trace one. It took him two months to find several fragments in Norton County, Kans. One of them weighed 130 Ibs. and was made of stony material mixed with globules of nickel and iron.

According to one theory, it was once part of a planet that blew up, and it came from the planet's stony crust but contained traces of the metallic core. A sample was air-expressed at once to the Institute before its radioactivity could diminish much. What it told about its life with the cosmic rays the Institute isn't saying in public, yet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.