Word: crater
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Giant Crater. In a related experiment, Ponnamperuma and NASA Chemist Fritz Woeller flashed artificial lightning through a mixture of ammonia and methane simulating Jupiter's atmosphere. Besides producing amino acids and other organic materials that have led experimenters to speculate that primitive life could exist in the Jovian atmosphere, the discharges created large quantities of a translucent, ruby-red organic dye. This dye, the scientists speculate, may well explain the mark on Jupiter's surface, 30,000 miles long and 8,000 miles wide, that astronomers call the Great Red Spot...
...they reason, the Jovian atmosphere may consist largely of red dye material. Because of white clouds of frozen ammonia crystals at the outer fringes of the atmosphere, the red atmosphere is largely invisible from above. But below the red spot, some scientists believe, there might be a giant meteor crater in the solid hydrogen surface of the planet. This crater, the NASA researchers suggest, may form a great vortex in the atmosphere that swirls the red-hued dye up through the cloud cover, thus creating Jupiter's distinctive red spot...
...lunar sky. But closer inspection showed two seemingly insignificant starlike dots of light on the night portion of the earth. They were historic dots. Each represented the light from an argon-ion laser beam aimed from Tucson, Ariz., and Wrightwood, Calif., at Surveyor's location near the lunar crater Tycho, some 240,000 miles away...
...robot? As a sort of job-end bonus for a mission brilliantly accomplished, NASA left it up to a panel of lunar experts. They decided to gamble on an exploratory shot to one of the moon's unknown upland regions: the rock-strewn ridges just north of the crater Tycho, in the moon's southwestern quadrant...
Jewel-Box Glitch. Tycho's significance lies in the fact that it is one of the moon's youngest and major craters. From its 15,000-foot depths, a pattern of grooves or ridges spokes out over hundreds of miles of the moon's pock-marked surface. The scientists hoped to compare the composition of this terrain with that of the low-lying basically basaltic equatorial "seas," studied by earlier Surveyors. Since Tycho is believed to have been formed by the impact of a giant meteorite, and by the intense volcanic activity that followed, a look...