10-03-2007
|
 |
Modministrator
Trilobytes of terror!
|
|
Member Since: Apr 2004
Location: Herndon, Virginia
Posts: 22,975
|
|
|
Re: Beep…beep… beep - Fifty years since Sputnik.
A little something to show just how far mankind has come in our journey into space (from Popular Science, August, 1933):
Quote:
GETTING More LIGHT On the Moon
By Calvin Frazer
IT IS unwise to dogmatize about the future, and hence a cautious man of science “would hardly make the positive assertion that human beings will never visit the moon, though the difficulties involved in such a journey now appear insuperable. On the other hand it is quite safe to assert that, without leaving his own planet, man will learn much more about the earth’s satellite in days to come than he knows today. This expectation is based upon the remarkable progress accomplished in the study of the moon in recent years.
Here are a few achievements that would have seemed utterly and forever impossible to astronomers of a century ago:
It has long been realized that the lunar surface must get intensely hot during the long lunar day and intensely cold during the long lunar night, as the moon has no atmosphere—or none to speak of—to temper and conserve the heat of the sun’s rays. Science could only speculate, however, about lunar temperatures until a recently invented instrument, the vacuum thermocouple, was attached to the big 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory and applied to the actual measurement of these temperatures from point to point on the surface of the moon.
These measurements show that wherever the sun’s rays fall vertically upon the moon the surface becomes a little hotter than boiling water, while at the edge of the illuminated area the surface is nearly as cold as liquid air. When the solar rays are withdrawn during the lunar night, which is half a month long, the surface gets colder and colder until its temperature is probably as low as 240 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
A range of about 450 degrees between midday and midnight is one of the reasons why human visits to the moon are apparently impossible!
|
Link to full article and scans of original pages
|