Word: agee
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...moon rocket stood ready to launch three American astronauts on man's first attempt to set foot on the surface of another celestial body. If the bold attempt is successful, the journey will be remembered as long as the human race endures. It will open a new age of exploration, one that may ultimately reach to the outer limits of the solar system and even to the stars beyond...
...past five years, man has used the sophisticated instruments of the space age to learn more about the moon than he did during the 360 years that followed Galileo's pioneering look at the lunar surface through a telescope in 1609: Unmanned spacecraft have crashed into the moon, orbited it, measured it, and photographed it from every conceivable angle, giving man his first view of the lunar far side. Ingenious soft-landing spacecraft have dug into its soil and even chemically analyzed it by remote control...
Several groups of the eager investigators have been assigned the job of measuring the age of the lunar specimens by radioactive dating methods. By determining the ratio of radioactive elements (say, rubidium and uranium) in a moon sample to the amounts of their products of decay (strontium and lead, respectively), scientists can make a good approximation of its age. Thus, because the Apollo 11 samples will be taken from the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity, researchers may well be able to estimate the age of the moon's maria, or seas. This, in turn, might settle a longstanding controversy...
...rocks date back about 3.3 billion years. "What has happened during the missing 1.2 billion years?" wonders Astronomer Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "We do not know; they are a blank page in the history of our planet. If the age of the rocks on the surface of the moon turns out to be 4.5 billion years, we may learn the answer." One of the most important parts of the answer concerns biogenesis, the beginning of life, which occurred on earth more than three billion years...
...fuel. Moon technicians will decompose it into hydrogen and oxygen gases by electrolysis, then feed the gases into a lunar cryostat, a device that can reach extremely low temperatures during the chill lunar night without using power. The resulting products would be liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, familiar space-age fuels...