Word: asteroids
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...exposed atop Mount Palomar last month, he was openly skeptical. At the edge of the small, irregular galaxy that he was studying in the constellation Centaurus, he saw a large burst of light brighter than the entire galaxy itself that had not been there before. Had a stray asteroid wandered into the telescope's field of view? Closer inspection quickly revealed that the light came not from a nearby asteroid, but from a far more awesome heavenly phenomenon: a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star...
...parodied in Gaetano Pesce's "Moloch" floor lamp: a tensor desk light enlarged to a height of 9 ft. And, just as many a Victorian bronze looked better with a lampshade than as sculpture, the use of neon tubing becomes laconically appropriate in Ettore Sottsass's "Asteroid" lamp. What goes on with such designers is not a passive borrowing of fine-art motifs but, as Museum Curator Emilio Ambasz puts it, an "ironic manipulation of the sociocultural meanings attached to existing forms...
...more significant is the geological diversity of the landing area. It may contain three basically different types of material: 1) original crustal rock dating back to the moon's birth some 4.6 billion years ago; 2) a layer that was melted and then hardened after the great asteroid impacts that created such large features as the Sea of Rains nearly a billion years later; and 3) more recent lava flows, possibly produced by the eruption of volcanoes. Explains Caltech Geologist Eugene Shoemaker: "The geology of the lunar highlands is incredibly difficult and complex, far more so than the earth...
Scheduled to begin this week, the journey will be the most spectacular ever undertaken from earth: an odyssey of two years and half a billion miles-including a hazardous stretch through the asteroid belt-to fly to within 87,000 miles of the planet Jupiter. If all goes well, the unmanned ship-Pioneer 10-will radio back the first closeup pictures of the giant planet, probe its intense magnetic fields and radiation belts and perhaps peek at one of the twelve Jovian moons. Then with the planet's powerful gravity acting as a slingshot, Pioneer will be hurled beyond...
...tropical garden, they embrace, then shoot skyward via an elevator. They float among color-slide-projected stars, perch on the solid-looking edge of a planet examining a literal representation of the sun's corona, finally end their galactic tour by strolling across what seems to be an asteroid before ending up again in their dank garden...