Word: crater
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Force Observers James C. Greenacre and Edward M. Barr had a painstaking job: with the 24-in. telescope of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., they were to map a part of the moon-the well-defined crater Aristarchus, 27 miles in diameter. Both men were thoroughly familiar with the crater and its vicinity; Greenacre could hardly believe his eyes when he saw two bright red spots looming to the northwest and a third just inside the crater's rim. "I had the impression that I was looking into a large, polished gem ruby," he says...
...light of morning showed only a few tangled pieces of metal, and an ugly, water-filled crater-6 ft. deep and 150 ft. wide. It was all that remained of Trans-Canada Airlines Flight 831, a DC-8F jet with seven crew and 111 passengers aboard. At 6:30 p.m., the big red-and-silver jetliner lifted off Montreal's rainswept International Airport and banked left on course for Toronto 320 miles to the southwest. Four minutes later, townsfolk in Ste. Thérèse de Blainville heard a thunderous explosion as the plane slammed into a muddy...
...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 and dropped on earth...
...scientists tested their new dating system on tektites found in Canada and the U.S. All proved to be 34 million years old. Impactites from the Clearwater Lake crater in northern Quebec and from far-off Libya have the same age. Other tests show that tektites found in Czechoslovakia pair up with impactites from an ancient meteor crater in Germany. Both are 15 million years old. An impactite from Tasmania is 700,000 years old, the same age as tektites found in Australia, Indonesia and Southeast Asia...
...Energy Commission's Project Plowshare, exploring peaceful applications of nuclear explosions. He told of a Plowshare test in Nevada last summer in which a thermonuclear device with a power of 100 kilotons (equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT) was exploded underground, creating in a few seconds a crater 1,200 ft. wide and 320 ft. deep. Such explosions, he said, could be used to make harbors and canals, remove earth and rock covering mineral deposits. Nuclear explosions, said Teller, have "the potentiality of becoming the first really important and thoroughly economic use of atomic energy." The reasons...