Word: cayley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...simple adage. Says Truxton Pratt, a senior vice president of Bankers Trust Co. who flies a sailplane in New England: "You reach a point in life and the adventure stops. Soaring puts it back." Hang-gliding and soaring have common roots in the 19th century, when English Inventor George Cayley and later, German Engineer Otto Lilienthal began applying their knowledge of birds to efforts to get man off the ground. After World War I, the Versailles Treaty denied military aircraft to the vanquished and the Germans trained some 50,000 glider pilots. Americans began picking up the gliding habit...
Movie footage taken through a window of the descending lunar module Orion offers a panoramic view of the rubbled Cayley Plains, the craters looming ever larger. Then a black speck appears on the approaching surface, expanding rapidly until it is recognizable as Orion's sharp, spidery shadow, and finally disappearing in a swirl of gray dust as the lander touches on the surface. There are also still shots that strikingly convey the eerie desolation of lunar distances. None is more dramatic than one that shows the Lunar Rover parked on the far edge of a yawning crater while Astronaut...
...film involves the electric-powered Lunar Rover. One sequence, shot from the Rover, provides a driver's-eye view of the passing landscape as the little vehicle skitters across the rock-littered surface. Others show the Rover bouncing off rocks as Astronaut John Young hot-rods along the Cayley Plains or throwing up rooster tails of moon dust as he puts it through a series of skidding, Le Mans-type racing turns. "It's simply a superb vehicle," said the high-spirited Duke after his return to Houston. The vehicle's designers could only agree. NASA engineers...
Wrong Reasons. Some of the findings were surprising indeed. Although geologists had forecast that there would be a trove of heat-formed crystalline rocks on the Descartes region's Cayley Plains, most of what the astronauts and their cameras saw were fragments called breccias, which are forged together from still more ancient rocks. At the very least, that unexpected finding means that the Cayley Plains were formed, not simply by volcanic flows, but by far more complex geological processes. Said NASA Geochemist Robin Brett: "We went to the right place for the wrong reasons...
Before the first moon walk ended, scientists in Houston were surprised to hear that the multitude of rocks gathered by the astronauts apparently included few crystalline, or heat-formed specimens; that cast doubt on the theory that the Descartes area's Cayley Plains were once the site of volcanic flows. The day's prize find was made by the Houston scientists themselves. With the TV finally on after a second antenna had been aligned with earth, they could direct Duke's attention to a large, football-sized rock that glittered with imbedded black glass fragments...