Word: asteroidal
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...other student poems are generally clearer, but so slight as to be almost non-existent. The sentence, "The bright sun of dance makes no/moon of him, he receives the light/an asteroid past Pluto," which appears in Gavin Borden's "Marriage," must rank as the least happy of the issue...
...earth and its nearby partner the moon live in an orderly neighborhood; only at vast intervals, millions of years apart, is the area blasted by trouble. Then a giant meteor, perhaps a wanderer from the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, streaks into range. If it happens to hit the earth, it blasts a crater many miles across, sometimes melting nearby rock and spewing out slaglike material called impactite. If it collides with the moon, the crashing meteor produces glassy objects called tektites, which many scientists believe are knocked out of lunar craters, solidified in space...
...Asteroids are familiar ground for many fictional characters, including Antoine de Saint-Exupery's charming "Little Prince," who lives on asteroid B-612 and cleans out its two active volcanoes with a plumber's helper. But real-life spacemen have largely ignored the small, airless planets in their race to reach the moon and Mars...
Very large near-approach asteroids are surely scarce, but Kohler estimates that between 10 million and 10 billion objects 30 ft. to 300 ft. in diameter pass each year within 20 million miles of the earth. A good number of them probably come much closer, perhaps within several hundred thousand miles. Kohler urges that a careful search be made for these visitors with special electronic telescopes. If an asteroid promises to make a close approach to the earth in the near future, he urges, it should become a prospective target for space explorers...
...intimacy with asteroids increases, thinks Kohler, space voyagers may hitchhike on them, finding shelter from radiation, and perhaps fuel or structural material. Even a small asteroid will provide a steady base for telescopes. If an asteroid is traveling roughly parallel to the earth, it might be steered into an earth orbit. Then it could be hollowed out and used by spacemen as a roomy, steady, well-shielded satellite base...