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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Sounding Projectile  
  Provides a way to tell whether there’s a soldid surface on a cloudy planet.  

In the 1930's, little was known (or correctly inferred) about the planets. Obviously, Saturn is intensely cloudy. But can you find a solid surface?

His hands clutched a switch. A slight movement shot a sounding projectile from a point on the undersurface of his craft. It darted down, and in a few seconds burst into a clouded patch of incandescence. That meant that it had struck something firm enough to discharge its percussion cap.
Technovelgy from Mad Robot, by Raymond Z. Gallun.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936
Additional resources -

See the article on Impactor Determines Composition from The Mechanical Monarch (1958) by E.C. Tubb.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Mad Robot
  More Ideas and Technology by Raymond Z. Gallun
  Tech news articles related to Mad Robot
  Tech news articles related to works by Raymond Z. Gallun

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