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    National Geographic 1981

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    212 views160 pages

    National Geographic 1981-07 160-1 Jul

    Uploaded by

    Ad Mina
    National Geographic 1981

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    Re, Ne VOL. 160, NO. 1 me JULY 1981 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ee Ley Ce eae Le eed BOMBAY, THE OTHER INDIA 104 Se eC N THE HEAT of EtSalvador’s civil war, iB leftist leader told reporters that the death of a journalist would “elearly ad- vance the struggle here - _ _ so long asit was amember of the U.S. press. You are more powerful, more visible,” Afew months later, photographer Olivier Rebbot, a free lance working for Newsweek, was killed by a sniper bullet. He was the eighth journalist known dead or missing in covering that war since April 1980, [t may have disappointed hismurderers to find that he was French, not American, Halfa world away, Senior Assistant Edi- tor Robert Jordan was deliberately fired upon by-a Somalia Liberation Front unit while preparingan article for our June issue, In Nicaragua in 1979, the point-blank murder bya government soldier of ABC-TV. reporter Bill Stewart was filmed by his own crew. Covering the world has always had its risks, but these incidents stand #s tragic tes timony that the loss of so many reporters in recent vears is more than a twist of fate. Not long ago most developing nations — s¢nsitive to the power of pen and camera— courted the foreign press. Today many still see it as a powerful force, but one to be controlled. ‘The International Press Institute counts only 20 countries in the world with a truly free press. Even UNESCO fired a volley at press freedom when a studyit commissioned recommended licensing reporters and issu- ing ID cardsin orderto™“protect” them. This idea, favored by Third World nations, has been dropped for now, but it reflects in- creasing hostility toward a free press. This especially affects the Grocrapnic, since we often require access to an area for long periods of time. Increasingly, this has become difficult or impos: ‘The Third World may justifiably feel that some articlesdistort its problems, may be in- sensitive or even inaccurate. We can only hope it learns that a less-than-perfect free press is better than none and can come to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who said— when we werea developing nation: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or news- papers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Hither E Chet ‘korea NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC July 1981 VOYAGER | AT SATURN Riddles of the Rings 3 From a billion miles out, aa unmanned NASA spacecraft sends home spectacular views of the haleed planet, Rick Gore relates why the images astounded and edified scientists. A double supplement shows Saturn full face and to scale in our solar system. Costa Rica Steers the Middle Course 42 Kent Britt reports on a peaceable land of prosperous optimism where democricy works and armies are illegal—a true rarity amid Central America’s masaic of strife. Troubled Times for Central America 58 Political turmioil and violence still wrack most of the nations of the tropical isthmus, whose promise and problems are detailed ona foldeet map. Living With Guanacos 63 Tens of millions of these fuurry wild camels roamed South America until meat and pelt hunters devastated thelr herds, Wildlife ecologist William L. Franklin and his family spend months studying them in remote Tierra del Fuego. Buffalo Bill and the Enduring West 76 A man whose nickname became a legend reatly wes the quintessential Westerner—Pony Express rider, Army scout, buffalo hunter, and master showman. By Alice J. Hall, with photos by James L. Amas Bombay, the Other India roy From glittering skyscrapers to desperate slurs, India’s commerciat capital ts one big paradax, John Scofield and Raghubir Singh discover, The Fungus That Walks 131 An oft beautiful something called slime mali lives among us, behaving like both plant and animal and creating micro-sculpture in the wild. Text by Dougias Lee, photographs by Paul A. Zahl. COVER: Multiringed Sarum glows with bands of colar in a far-off springtime. Voyager 1 image with colors added by NASA. VOYAGER 1 AT SATURN Riddles of the Rings Still 18 million kilometers away, Voyager | takes a portrait of Saturn and two of its moons, one casting its shadow on the cloud tops below the rings. Shortly, Voyager would find the bizarre peality—puzzles in the rings and enigmas on the moons. With worlds yet to reveal, the unmanned Voyager spacecraft have proved themselves instruments of wonder on the frontier that forever recedes By RICK GORE Photographs by NASA aon ‘SHEPHERD Saturn's rings OVEMBER 10, 1980. The Voy pacecraft is a bi ientisisare hop at cle hide its ace, Some even ve evolved on T ying most attention, rings. Wh hought Gi fe could yager has ever, to the tronic eyes. The Cassini Division, a sup- posedly clear zone between the outer A ring nd the middle i hat least The close-in C ring looks dark and different. Voyager is watching two that se to be round Saturn in alt ling moon is traveling fa and should catch up wi s. Big, my Piney Sey a z t. The JPL pr ems with repo ame for the Jupite monite to the imag tion. Not f h ad psyched f Jupite look cool, ethereal N AURA OF ASTONISHMENT 1 from a distance orderly enough to have in Pasadena, California. Twenty Saturn és a my months earlier this same \ r hud notes Reta Beebe, a mission scientist Liscovered so many marvels at Jupite Through even a small telescope, it’s t plex, storm-tossed atmosphere, a thin ‘most beautiful thing in th c m on one mo¢ {evidence Right now, to Brad Smith, t r of fancient Earth-like crustal movements on Voyager Continued 0. another—that its Saturn encounter hac 1 { threatened to be anticlimactic.* er'sdazzling 3866 The rings: spoked, tilted, and eccentric d it to bx Seen farther oust in’ the gre the A ring are two brigl ether. Between them t begins as white right-hand corner, When fold upper ise, the ringlet turns wh nn be roughly de upon them te view (right, middle) 1 lit, halfwwas t Lapproached. Regions thick w reflect light and thus void of material appear dark. Jed, halfoftheimage ent from beneath the ring: material Re tietes but also, because of low density, all ht to pa throu bright from ab dark below no fi nsity so great that ms. dark tthet va ject to perturba bedded The complex pls the rin bur obvious. As: mission s uct (right) points out: “t th ture is going to to 's not something t at jtist clic Riddles of the Rings Shepherd moons imaging team, Saturn is also the most be- deviling thing in the sky. Today he is most baffled by those odd spokes, or fingerlike projections, that are slightly darker than the rings themselves and that stretch across the Bring. “We've never been confused for so long about anything so obvious,” he savs, swat- ting rolled-up paper against his palm, “It's just so damned frustrating professionally. ‘We first saw them three weeks ago, and we still don’t have any good ideas.” ‘These spokes emerge from theshaded side of Saturn, sometimes in bursts of five or so, and revolve with the rings. Gradually they fade away, Theoretically each particle that makes up the spokes should behave like a mini-satellite, Those closer to Saturn should be moving much faster than those farther out. The spokes should tear apart. Yet they seem to stay perfectly aligned “Haw do they form in the first place?” asks the frustrated Smith. “How do all those particles know to turn dark and line them- selves up over 25,000 kilometers?” OVEMBER 11, 1980. Voyager is two million kilometers from Saturn and tonight flies within 4,000 kilometers of Titan, More ring close-ups have come in Life grows no simpler for Brad Smith “The mystery of the rings keeps getting deeper and deeper, until we think it's a bot- tomless pit,” he saysata press briefing, “The thing [east expected to see was an eccentric ring—and we have found two,” ‘He flashes on a picture of one ringlet dra- matically fatter on one side of Saturn thanon the other (page 7) ‘Odd things too are happening out at the thin F ring, the one being shepherded by two little moons. Voyager images now show clumps in the F ring. Could these clumps be satellites trying to form? Are they moontets being eroded? Do gravitational forces from the shepherding satellites focus ring mate- nial into odd-shaped regions? The mission scientists are clearly thinking on their feet. The F ring is close to what astrophysicists call the Roche limit. Inside this limit the gravitational pull from huge Saturn should keep larue satellites from forming. ‘The Roche limit helpsexplain why Saturn has rings. Most scientists believe that more 10 than 4.6 billion years ago, when Saturn was forming out of thesolar nebula, it was much larger. It collapsed suddenly, then began spinningso rapidly that some ofits gases and. dust were left in a flat disk around its equa- tor, Hot, young Saturn kept this disk much warmer than the minus 185°C (-300°F) tem- peratures in the rings today, Heavier mate- rials stich as metals and silicates either coalesced into Saturn's forming moons or swirled inward to form its deeply buried Earth-size core, which may be molten. As the planet shrank further, it;cooled, as did the ring region. The water vapor that was left there froze, says a leading theorist, Jim Pollack, and the resulting ice crystals gradually accreted into ring purticles thoughtto beno morethanameterindiame- ter, At some point a phenomenal blast of solar wind blew away any gas that had not yet condensed. The ring particles would thus be the pieces of a large ice moon that could never pull itself together. ‘There has long been a competing view, however. Perhaps all those particles did not form where they are today. Perhaps they resulted from some catastrophe. The rings could actually be the end product of a moon, suggests mission geologist Gene Shoe- maker. They could be a satellite smashed to pieces by another icy body. Or perhaps such a bedy, a traveling, homeless moon, was torn apart by Saturn's gravity. ‘However the rings formed, most astrono- mers believe they have been choreographed ever since by the laws of orbital mechanics, especially the process called resonance, ‘Through resonance the gravitational ef fects of Saturn's moons on parts of the rings are greatly magnified. For instance the moon Mimas and the inner edge of the Cas- sini Division are in resonance, Mimas takes exactly twice as long to orbit Saturn as do. certain Cassini particles. This regularity means that these particles meet a slight gravitational tug from Mimas at precisely the same place every other orbit, Over time that extra tug stretches their circular orbits intoellipses, Eons ago Cassini particles thus started to crash into particles in adjacent orbits. Colliding particles were thrown into other parts of the rings. Gradually a large gap was swept out. Before Voyager such resonances. were National Geographic, July 1981 nsible for what little wn. But now the thought to be resp structure the rings had monitors at JPL are showing more ture, not only in the rings but a the Cassini Division, thanany symphony of -es could explain. truc- resonant HE NAME Peter Goldreich keeps pop- h is not onthe Voy ager team. He teaches at the nearby California Institute of Technology. But of the minds that probe the dynamics of the solar system, his is among the very best. Nearly two years ago in his Caltech off he noted: “The rings of Saturn are not going to be th ct then was U nus. At w, very peculia rings had recently been di round that plan t one out from Saturn One is only three kilometers wide. The oute i¢; its width varies from 20 to 100 Goldreich and Scott T posed that it was not re little moons, too hat created Uran: atellites orbiting close tog ng up, Ge these ri t is eecent nces but rather all to be viewed ings therean into confine small particles in betw a thin ring,” he had explai causes each satellite to repel the a Gravity repel? The explan ht ion isa riddle lover's deli The lawsof ¢ han e that satellites in higher orbits go more slowly ian those below because they need less ve: locity to overcome the pull the planet. So if you have two moons with lots of ring particles between them, theinner on will move faster than the partic he outer moon will move more sider the inner moon first, Asit r the slower ring particles, its gravity does in deed tug at them, pulling the particles close to it and slowing them down. But as the ses, its gravity then starts to pull of gravity from mi an owls ie moon f the particles along after it, speeding them Because the parti ve been pulled closer to the moon, thi lite's g ffect on them after Se before, So they are accel {more than they were slowed down. Th ting partis get a net energy gain from the inner moon. That ene bonsts— Saturn: Riddles of the Rings ncoun At the the kel ron its appoii r 2 will use rs 2ved outer limits of ¢} ipa re the ger expand aga make some at least to Earth. olar wind can fe prisgure oF the pressure 0) cles into at orbit s true ter moor svertaking it. So. as the moon, it speeds them up and draws ct with the 4 are ing them down. The particles are closer to the moon when they start being d. So they have a net energy | Losing energy, they fall The moon pushes the yen though the moons themselves gain dl lose energy interacting with the p eles, resonances with other moons « et them in their orbit Many considered such gravitations gamesmanship unconvineing. “It's a terri ble thing to have to make a model when you ed nine I tcllites that can't be seen,” Goldreich ceded, “but Thawe no doubt that it’s correct.” ato pherding moons act just like of Uranus lel, Coul rturb in his 11 ave ible OVEMBER 12, 1980. The tir tinue to confound. “We had seen all there wa: Smith tells the press. “But Saturn's ri When we s what we become commonplace the F ring today, th What Smith shows is a picture of the F ring split into three strands—two of them uppear intertwined. They resemble a DNA double helix. Someone jokes that Voyager discovered life at the > ki Braiding defie pics for at Saturn, Smit he strand: the laws of orbital me ihe says. “But doing the right ierstand the everal reasons iously these ring: very well ntion is about to be drawn away from ight the closest images re long. Cloud. Titan ry W tures. But today begins a zzying series of closest encounters with Saturn's other {moe Mimas, E Tet Rhea, Ni tion Hyperion, Tapetis nd Phoebe, “Too many moons,” grumbles arty Soderblom, Until this ek: { moons were merely p Project sc nunciation. Some ss My-mas. Some maki und like a Mexican dish bodies are much smaller than s and Jupiter moons, or th A dangerous reef in the rings HE 15-GENERATION GAP: For cen turies after Franeo-T astronemer Jean Dominique Cass what cemed to he a gap in Saturn's rings and sketched it (above), the Cassini Div was thought to beaclearzone.A detail ofa and reject aft to Saturn, would have Division and final way, or 321 20:38:03 YORI SATURN ENC Some tr] Cr nr ei brother satellite Titan, yet larger than most asteroids and the tiny moons around M Jupiter, or Sate They should be m m: oughly the om 6 rial—dust and ices should be too small to fioactive rocky mate bodies heats uj geologic pro esses suchas volcanism, These watery moons should have frozen fast soon after i. They ‘ked with craters, the sears of « collisi with celestial debris ions they are any- < enough to Iapetus to reveal much, It will otograph Phoebe, the farthest ‘out. Phoebe has long been known totravelin the opposite direction from Saturn's other moons. It is most likely debris captured by Satu by Inpetus is perplexing. Even from Earth, OWS ) faces. One side is five timy ter than the other. No onereally knows n’s gravity as it pa it brigh Navigation so precise it all bur defies put and nation was reg ep the ty ired to course. ¥ trated work went inte wr 10,000 possi ble trajectories aceeraft fis to be sorted and For example enormou: tune Three days after Voyager 1's clos: to Saturn, Charles and Ray Hea go over data for Voyager 2's en. nter—still 283 days away, yet an ate and pressing concern 43a navigation aid, eamputer- enerated im ¢ the region ere Voyager 2 witt pass between cd Uranus (right) and its moon reach Nept orth pole jus the surface why will not But Voyager 1 has begun s startling features on the inner m y the the bland snowballs everye cept for an eno im ppa 16-17), Its walls are five kilometers deep, its diameter a third that of the moon. It is among the largest craters, relative to the size f the body hit, ever seen. Mimas came ve ose to being blown ap: Like the other moons, Mimas is so cold that ice 01 putal and Voyager it well ms, ast, looks the most like xpected, ex- t crater ern ju pages n its surface is ock. “It's This cratering has “fluffed up" or dened" the surface to a depth of at least several kilometers. So walking on Mim: would bealittle like walking on a large snow cone, with many ice chunks, some larger than a house, sticking up from the rubble. Farther out and much larger is Tethys. A great branching trench 63 kilometers wi stretches nearly from one end of this well National Geographic, July 1981 ture. ILappea within. Perhap: tress y ng and expanding terior cracked the surface of the haps i trench, Yet pur rswallowing les of the Rir IOVEMBER 13, 1980. Scientist Ruc Hanel, leader of the NASA inftare spectroscopy and radiometry team The ple, but Hane! Mimas: a satellite nearly shattered Meth fer vapor is on Eart eis only a minor that Titan's thi heat down below to make There are not that many t lar system. Titan has one be massive enough t tationally, Also, its that gas id onte gases grav mperatures

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