Word: crater
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cluster of pits showed up with edges that did not look as jagged as those of most lunar craters. As Ranger dropped lower, the clustered craters grew, and one of them showed black dots inside its rim. Nothing of the sort, said Kuiper, had ever before been seen on the moon. His guess was that the pits were made when a giant meteorite hit the moon and dug the conspicuous crater Copernicus, which is surrounded by "rays" that are believed to be splashed-out material. Astronomers used to think that this material was some sort of dust, but Kuiper...
...would have taken too long to be practical, but the Army's Honeywell computer raced headlong through thousands of bristling equations. Gradually the map of the moon's visible disk, which has just about the same area as North America, filled with measured mountains and crater rims...
Arbitrary Altitude. The moon has no sea level to use as base elevation (its so-called seas are waterless plains), so Nowicki selected Mösting A, an easily identified crater near the center of the disk and gave the bottom of its crater the arbitrary altitude of 7,000 meters (23,000 ft.) to serve as reference for all other elevations. The finished map, which is 4.5 ft. in diameter, includes more than 5,000 surface features, giving elevations in hundreds of meters. One version of the map shows high and low areas in colors: the highest mountains...
...Into the Crater. Dr. Tazieff was born in Warsaw of Russian parents, lives in Paris and is a Belgian citizen. A geologist by training, he got hooked on volcanology in 1948 when he was working in Katanga and got a telegram telling him to investigate an eruption near Lake Kivu. He found Mount Kituro blasting furiously, but descended alone into the crater with only a handkerchief tied over his face. The volcano stepped up its action, attacking him with poisonous fumes and great gobs of molten lava. He barely managed to struggle out of the crater alive. "I found...
...Tazieff made an intimate study of Irazú, which staged several fine explosions for their benefit. There was nothing they could do to cure the eruption, of course, but on their recommendation Minister of the Volcano Jorge Manuel Dengo built an armored observatory on the edge of the crater and equipped it with instruments to report earth tremors that might precede an unusually violent outburst...