Shivering Look at Venus

At 10:15 one morning last week, the long, lanky balloon rose slowly from a sheltered valley in the wooded hills outside Rapid City, S. Dak. Climbing slowly into the far blue sky, it gradually expanded to its full 172-ft. diameter. Huddled in the trim, 7-ft. pressurized spherical gondola that dangled beneath it like an afterthought were two scientists--Commander Malcolm Ross, 40, a balloonist from the Office of Naval Research, and Physicist-Engineer Charles B. Moore Jr., 39, a balloon expert who works for Arthur D. Little Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Their object: to get mankind's first good look at Venus clear of most of the earth's muffling atmosphere.

The Shivers. In effect, the two crewmen were emissaries of Dr. John Strong, of Johns Hopkins University, who designed the experiment but felt that skilled balloonists were better able to carry it out under the rigors of high-altitude flight. Chief instrument was a 16-in. telescope mounted on top of the gondola and manipulated by remote control by the scientists inside. But they ran into immediate trouble. Take-off had been delayed for three hours by a minor fire in the gondola, and by the time the balloon reached 80,000 ft., Venus was too low to catch in the telescope. They were forced to wait all through the long day.

When the sun set, the balloon cooled and dropped to 68,000 ft. Commander Ross dumped 300 lbs. of "sunset ballast" (mostly steel shot) to boost it up again. Though the gondola was insulated, it soon grew deathly cold. Both men shivered so hard that they literally shook the whole gondola. When Venus finally rose at 3:30 a.m., Moore started to turn the telescope toward it. But whenever the men moved, the gondola corkscrewed and rotated, vibrating all the time from their shivering. "It was very hard to point in a given direction," says Moore. "It showed that Newton's action and reaction theories are right. Everything we did produced an opposite reaction. It was like standing on an icy pond trying to push a car. All we did was push ourselves backward."

At 5:15 a.m. Moore finally got Venus in the telescope sights. A tracking system held the image in the telescope's focus for a few minutes. Then the balloon started slowly down, drifting south over Nebraska and into Kansas. As they approached the ground, the crew cut the gondola loose from the balloon and popped a 100-ft. parachute. A gusty wind caught the parachute, dragged the gondola across pastures and through fences for half a mile before marines following in helicopters caught it and cut it loose. Bruised and shaken, the scientists climbed out. The gondola was a battered wreck (see cut). Moore could walk, but Ross was so badly shaken up that one of the tracking helicopters took him to an Air Force hospital near Salina.

Water for Life. The data the scientists brought back to Dr. Strong proved worth the trouble. Inscribed on a thin strip of wax paper were spectroscopic readings of the light from Venus. They showed that when the sun's light passes through Venus' atmosphere, certain infra-red lines are partially absorbed, providing dramatic evidence that Venus' cloudy atmosphere contains water vapor.

Until Scientists Moore and Ross made their voyage, no trace of water had ever been detected. This was largely because the earth's own lower atmosphere is heavily laden with water that it obscured any effort to detect traces of water vapor on other planets. Moore estimates that the balloon rose so high that it was above 98% of the water in the air.

Since life without water is almost possible, many astronomers have long thought that Venus under its cloud deck must be as lifeless as the moon, traces on Dr. Strong's chart did not reveal whether Venus has oceans of water only whiffs of vapors. But they did leave room for hope that when the first earthling explorers feel their blind and perilous way under the cloud deck of Venus they may find a kind of life not wh different from life on earth.

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