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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 17, 1963)
Mariner IHI ids By HENRY KEYS United Preu Internetionsl Washington - IUPB - When the tiny, spidery spacecraft Mariner 2 flashed across the face of the planet Venus on Dec. 14 it had accomplished one of the most exciting voy. ages of exploration in the his tory of mankind. For the first time, man had reached out into distant space to unlock some of the secrets of another planet. For Dr. William Pickering, Director of the Jet Propul sion laboratory at Pasadena, Calif., and hundreds of fellow scientists and technicians it was as if they had been part ners in a miracle. . For three long months, ever since Mariner 2 was flung into space in late August, thev had been living in a state of high tension, filled with real fears and anxieties that Mar iner might not make it. From time to time, things did go wrong, some strange and in explicable. An American Epic ' The story of Mariner's 182-million-mile flight to its ren dezvous with the evening star as told by Pickering and col leagues Is an American epic. Pickering is a slight, small boned man with lively, laugh ing eyes who revels in the in tellectual excitement of his trade and talks of Mariner in terms that any layman can understand. A New Zealander by birth, Pickering came to the United States at age 16 to continue his education at the Techni 'cal Institute of California (Cal Tech). He has remained here ever since and become an American in the process. As Director of Cal. Tech's JPL laboratories he is the man primarily responsible for Mariner's flight. He talks of it as if it is indeed part of him. All spacemen chained to the laboratories do that, of course. But when Pickering says "we're 37 million miles out today? you feel that he is in heart and spirit out there with Mariner racing toward the searing embrace of the sun. The day before Mariner's successful probe of Venus, men walked around the lab oratory not because they were going anywhere but just to be doing something. Others sat quietly doing nothing -just "sweating it out." The stress showed on everyone. -Call Feared , Every time a telephone rang heads would jerk around. The man answering it would seem to freeze before he pick ed it up, fearing it might be a call from the Goldstone Tracking Station, or someone In the lab reporting something wrong with Mariner. "The telephone b e c a me such a 'thing' in people's mind that when the project manager. Jack James, called me up one day his first words were, 'don't worry Pickering said with a laugh. One of the tense moments of Mariner's three - month space voyage came with the turning on of the Earth Lock. As Pickering described it, Mariner was slowly rolling round in space. To stop it, a pre-arranged signal had to go to Mariner's tiny, Earth seeking telescope instructing it to stop rolling, find the Earth and lock on to it. Mar iner's Sun Sensor, of course, was pointed at the Sun vir tually from the beginning as this was essential for .Marin er's Solar plates to gather and store electrical energy irom the Sun. But the space craft had to line up on Earth, too. Otherwise it would not beam its space reports back, or, for that matter, carry out its program. "It was a fairly complex operation," Pickering said. "We were eight days out and a million miles off in space. We knew when it should hap pen, but we could not help worrying whether it would. Everybody seemed to be Vtanding around, waiting. Sure enough, right on time, it did." From the time Mariner's biult-ln electronic brain and (advertisement) FAT OVERWEIGHT Available to you without i doctor's prescription, our arug caiico uu. RINEX. You must lose ugly tit in 7 days or your money back. 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"But the really big event was the mid-course maneu ver," Pickering said. The midcourse maneuver was necessary to correct the path of Mariner's flight. If it continued on the course it was on at launch it would have missed Venus by a quarter of a million miles . The mid course correction was aimed at bringing Mariner to with in 21,000 miles of Venus. In essence, Mariner, on in struction from Earth, had to turn itself around, turn on a tiny rocket engine, run it for 27 seconds and turn it off again. It then had to find the Sun and the Earth again. To enable the rocket engine to fire, Pickering explained, the high gain antenna (used to beam Mariner's messages back to Earth) had to move out of the way, out of the line of fire of the rocket engine, and then, when the maneuver was over, move back into pos ition. Tense, Exciting "It was tense and exciting. The data line was pitching and rolling, Pickering said, describing how the signals from Mariner appeared in the laboratory. "The whole opera tion took four hours to do. We were then out about million miles. We had to tell it what engines to turn on, otherwise we would miss Ven us by that quarter of a mil lion miles. We had to wait 18 Science Finds 32 Particles of Use In Orderly World Washington -IIM- New lab oratory devices, new, tech niques and new avenues of re search are expected to pro duce exciting advances in sev eral scientific fields during 1963. Among the possibilities: Physics - Already scientists have found 32 "basic" par ticles of the matter which makes up the universe. They have found additional parti cles which may turn out to be old ones interacting together in what is called "resonance." This year may see order be ginning to develop out of this chaos. Atomic Energy - Both. Rus sia and the United States are trying to perfect man-made Plutonium as a fuel for nu clear power reactors. Success would , make it possible to multiply atomic fission re sources by "breeding" new fuel out of presently inert materials. A $34.5 million Plutonium "breeder" goes into operation this year at the U.S. reactor test station in Idaho. ; . May Speed Drugs Radiation-Improved under standing of radiation effects and the operation of living cells may speed progress to ward development of anti- radiation drugs. Water - Several promising methods of converting sea water into fresh are being pushed. They are man's best bet for preventing a cata strophic shortage in the next several decades. Mantle - This year some 20 nations will embark on a three year "upper mantle project" to plumb the hidden depths of the earth. They hope to explore the outermost 600 miles of the planet's rocky in sides. This project, scientists say, is needed to provide understanding of the earth's origin and history. Lunar Bases - The space agency contracted for a six month study in 1963 prelimi nary to future construction of observatories and depots on the moon. The Sea - Preliminary de sign is being done on a nu clear reactor to operate at the bottom of the sea. It would supply power to under sea communities - when and if such submarine cities are built to harvest resources on the ocean floor. Progress is being made to ward control of cancer and cholesterol, and in many an other field of medicine and biological research, and to ward development of robots with electronic brains which eventually will do most of man's work for him. The greatest challenge, as some see it, is to develop means for controlling man himself. Prof. Thomas Park of the University of Chicago. believes man is in danger of multiplying himself out of existence. "One thing is certain," Park said recently. "If man does not manage his biology, it will manage him.". minutes for the midcourse motor to operate." It was a tense 18 minutes upon which everything hung. "After it, we actually watched Mariner pick up speed, Pickering said. "It was very complicated and it was a very satisfying feeling when it was over." Pickering and his col leagues regard the whole of Mariner's journey as a series and sequence of miracles, for Mariner had many hazards to survive, not the least of them, collisions with micrometeor ities. But there was no fluke or luck about it. A complex ser ies of 'what-if situations had been built into Mariner. Lois of Signal The next point of crisis was an unexpected loss of signal. Mariner was about a month out when the photocell-telescope signal faded and JPL scientists were Mystified. "The signal got so low it just disappeared. When you lose this signal it means Mar iner has lost Earth," Picker ing explained. Pickering said that he was due to leave for Europe at this time and was very wor ried about this situation. "I was in Munich when one of the boys phoned me. His first words were, 'you won't believe this, but . , . " Pick ering said. : The telephone call was to tell him that the trouble had righted itself. The signal from Mariner to Earth came back to exactly what it should have been. "The only , explanation," Pickering said, "is that some where in the telescopic ar rangement we got a ghost im age of the Earth and Mariner was looking at that instead of at Earth itself. The signal from a ghost image would of course be very weak. On Oct. 31, there was a sud den failure in the power sup ply. "The spacecraft was operating beautifully, but the measurements from one of the solar panels had gone bad. We were very concerned about this and turned off one of the experiments to con serve power. We were about to take a course of action from the ground when again the trouble righted itself," Pick ering continued. "The same ' kind of thing happened a week later. We worked it out on the ground that there was a short circuit in one part of the solar panel (which traps light from the Sun and converts it into elec tric energy to operate Mari ner's equipment. 'Try) 7" $ finnnmnn H i) it. r i un nui v,crcai CALL ME BILL Caerphilly, Wales -iVPD- The 450-membcr staff of a cloth ing factory staged a half-hour walkout Wednesday when management issued an order to call the foreman "minis ter." Add teaspoon or so to cereal as it cooks, or sprinkle over sweet ened cereal. Be sure it's Crescent because we pack only choice cin namon from the Far East, selected (t for extra aroma, flavor and color, i) CRESCENT v' Next Weekend JANUARY 20TH "This trouble has existed today. It is not serious and has not hurt the operation of the spacecraft. We started all experiments up again and we have not turned any off since." The Mariner raced closer to its encounter with Venus, the temperatures it was en countering became higher than had been planned for. Tension at JPL soared, too. "It looked like there might be a catastrophe," Pickering said. Batteryi Problem Causing the anxiety was a sealed, liquid-filled battery which had been designed to withstand temperatures up to 120 degrees fahrenheit. The high temperatures threatened expansion of the liquid so that there was danger that it could have blown itself up. Not even the designer, a ecreft-.bf Mystery PBouneft Japanese, could hazard guess what upper limits of temperature the battery would withstand. "The closer Mariner got to Venus, the more worried I got that I would get up one morning and it would quit," said Pickering. But it didn't. Indeed, Mari ner raced still nearer the Sun, in steadily increasing temp eratures, until Dec. 28 when Mariner came within 65.5 mil lion miles of the Sun and then started to head away from it. . Mariner is expected to con tinue transmitting informa tion about distant space for the best part of another three months. New anxieties developed on Wednesday, Dec. 12, two days before the expected encounter with Venus. "We detected trouble in the encounter mode," Pickering SECTION D Medford Personality Insight- "Lkwtllyn Thompjon Our Fx pert on (he Kremlin" New Education Program "Hov Tney're Training Youth for Modern Marriaga" Another Story In the "... Inspiring Moment" Series "The Snob Cure" by Sfoofl Wilton Recipe Riddles Humor Games SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE IN Family Weekly with your copy el the MAIL TRIBUNE i PAGES 1 to 8 Tribune MEDFORD, OREGON, THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 1963 said. Signals from the space craft showed that Mariner would not work in response to signals from the CCS. The job of the CCS on ap proach to Venus was to give signals that would automatic ally set into operation Mari ner's two radio-meters - a microwave and an infarcd ra diometer - which were to scan Venus during the fly-by and send back to Earth all the information which was c pected of this probe. The discovery on that Wednesday that the CCS was not going to work the radio meters therefore caused the gravest anxiety. It had two opportunities to function - once at 2:21 a.m. E.S.T. on Friday. Dec. 14, and again 3 hours and 20 minutes later. It failed. By this lime Pickering was In Washington - in bed at the club of the nation's intellec tuals, the Cosmos Club. Hear Mariner At NASA, JPL press officer Chris Clausen was on an open line to the laboratories in Pasadena, listening to the organ-like chords from Mart ncr and receiving up to the minute Information on its progress. Periodically, throughout the night, he would call up Pick ering and give him the latest news. "We were 36 million miles out in space," Pickering said. "We had one chance left, to send from Earth a signal that should perform the function that the CCS had failed to carry out. We had to do this. "The instructions went out to Mariner in a long series of 'ones' and 'O's', or dots and dashes, about 15 of them. It is the order in which these go out that tell Mariner precise ly what to do," said Picker ing. The command zipped out to Mariner at the speed of light - 186,300 miles a second -but because Mariner was 36 million miles away took 3-'4 minutes to reach it. It took another 3-U minutes for Mari ner to signal back that it had received and acted upon the signal and that the radio meters were all set to scan Venus the moment Mariner came over the planet's hori zon. That added up to per haps the longest 6-Vj minutes ever for the Mariner team. Pickering Asleep And what was Pickering doing? "I was sound asleep in the Cosmos Club. I was pretty sure it (the signal from Earth) would work. Before I left JPL we had 'locked up the loop,' " He said. In broad terms, this meant a check operation had indi cated Mariner would respond. "I rather liked J a ck James's comment that when it did happen 'out there' he got 'sort of relaxed,' " Pick ering said. As Mariner sped across Venus the radiometers scan ned its atmosphere for 42 minutes, nodding backwards and forwards slowly three times, sending a wealth of in formation to Earth in elec tronic code that will take JPL's computers some time yet to work out in detail. Soon - after the coded data is deciphered - many secrets of the mystery planet, Earth's nearest neighbor in the plan etary system, will be secrets no longer. mode naturally... so naturally it's better mm D 1113 r THRIFTY GREEN STAMPS! 2330 CRATER LAKE AVENUE Prices good through Sunday , . . Shop dally 9 a.m., till 8 p.m. Monday through Sunday. No Seles to Dealers. We Reserve the Right to Limit. IWYJVanMM&IOM V HERE TO V WE N UBCjA KRAFT JELLY Apple, Elderberry, Gripe, Blackberry or Strawberry 10-Oz: Reusable Glass McLeod liOHEY S-Lb. Can a m ttHwx. farm xm h tL. A M .ett CARROTS Packaged To Keep Them Garden Fresh and Crisp APPLES Oc S 2-lb. JJ Pkg. 7 lb FILL YOUR FREEZER AT THIS LOW PRICE! . .. . . 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