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Explorer VII, launched in October 1959, is still in orbit and still sending information. It has made nearly 2,300 passes and sent observations from nearly 1,000,000 data points. In 1960 it reported on the effects of two unusually violent eruptions on the sun. As the sun threw out vast streams of charged particles, charts were made via Explorer VII of their intensity and effects on the radiation belts. Never before had earth's scientists so good a ringside seat for watching solar explosions. Van Allen is sure that future satellites carrying instruments will yield even better information about the sun and its effects on the earth.
By almost any standard, Stanford Geneticist Joshua Lederberg is the purest of pure scientists. Yet Lederberg's current interests extend into space in a way that pauperizes science fiction. Working under a Rockefeller Foundation grant, he and his Stanford team are designing and building a prototype apparatus that can be landed on, say, Mars or Venus, and can send back information about possible plants, bacteria, viruses or other micro-organisms. Landed gently on the planet's surface, the machine would automatically run out a long tongue with an adhesive surface. This would pick up plants or micro-organisms in the soil and reel them beneath the lens of a fixed microscope. A television camera would photograph the magnified object and send the picture back to earth for study.
The implications of such a system are basic to biology. "Lacking an adequate framework of biological theory," Lederberg said recently, "we cannot easily construct a precise definition of life that could apply to all possible worlds. It would be incautious to reject the possibility of exotic forms of life that dispense with water or oxygen and that thrive at temperatures below minus 100 degrees or above 250 degrees centigrade." Lederberg hopes his experiment may one day decide the argument about whether life arose spontaneously on different planets or whether it arose everywhere (assuming it exists elsewhere) out of spores floating through space. This second theory, he says, has "odds against it of a million to one, even in the minds of its most enthusiastic supporters—and I'm one of them."
Another kind of space science—new-style astronomy—is near at hand. Ground-based optical astronomy just about reached its limit with the completion of the 200-in. Palomar Mountain telescope in 1948. Bigger optical telescopes will not be much better because of the turbulence of the earth's atmosphere. This deadlock may be broken by automatic telescopes carried by satellites far above all trace of air. Even if rather small, the telescopes will see much more clearly than the 200-incher. Perhaps they will settle the question of the "canals" on Mars. They will certainly observe in the heavens kinds of radiation (X-ray and ultraviolet) that cannot penetrate the atmosphere. This type of observation is important because many stars are known to radiate chiefly in these unobservable rays.