Word: apollos
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Thus last week began man's most audacious exploration of the moon. After a 31-day journey that was nagged by small problems, Apollo 15 had set down in the midst of lunar highlands almost precisely on target. Their site in the Hadley Rille area at the edge of the mountain-ringed Sea of Rains is so varied that scientists are convinced it will prove a geological gold mine offering important new clues to understanding the moon and earth. The mission, to be sure, comes at a troubled moment in NASA's history (see box, page...
Nearing the moon, the astronauts performed yet another new maneuver by firing an explosive tape to knock the panel off a section of the service module called SIM (for scientific instrument module). An innovation on Apollo 15, SIM is literally a high-flying laboratory: it contains eight different scientific instruments, including a tiny (78.5 Ibs.) subsatellite, two spectrometers and two special lunar mapping cameras...
...Apollo 15 crew was reported to be the best trained in geology of any of the moon explorers. And indeed they should have been. For Apollo 15 was the first of the new "J" missions, a flight category primarily concerned with science rather than engineering. The dangerous, 12-day, seven-hour journey of Apollo 15 had one overriding goal: to learn more about the most prominent heavenly body in the nighttime sky and thus more about the mysterious universe. Loved, feared, worshiped, the moon has figured in the mythology of most ancient people and has awed man since the beginning...
...another unexpected finding was the strength of the moon's magnetic field; pre-Apollo scientists were sure that there was no significant lunar magnetic field. But there is, though its strength is puny compared with earth's. Does that mean that the moon once had a molten iron core? Perhaps. Urey offers an alternate explanation. He maintains that the moon picked up its magnetism early in its history while it was closer to earth. And the arguments...
Even before the first Apollo flight, lunar scientists had made a startling discovery. They found that the unmanned lunar orbiters were being thrown unexpectedly off course as they passed over certain lunar seas. Careful calculation showed that this extra gravitational tug was apparently due to concentrations of denser material under the moon's surface. These "mascons," as they were dubbed, still defy explanation, although theories abound: one says that they are heavy material that crystallized early in the moon's history; another claims they are the compacted residue of meteors. To complicate matters, careful tracking of the Apollo...