Word: cratered
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Having spent 18 months probing the moon's surface and interior, Lunar Prospector is running out of fuel, and is expected to crash at the end of July. Rather than just let it go, however, NASA decided to give the satellite a final mission: to take aim at a crater near the moon's south pole and slam into it at 3,600 M.P.H...
...idea is to crash Prospector into what NASA scientists think might be a huge ice field and hope the impact sends up an icy spray big enough to be spotted--and measured--by the Hubble and ground-based telescopes. Controllers need to fly it into the right crater at just the right angle, and smack bang into the middle of the ice field. Says University of Texas aerospace engineer David Goldstein, who proposed the suicide splashdown: "It's going to be a close call...
Indonesia is the site of Freeport's most important asset, the Grasberg open-pit mine, developed under the auspices of the Suharto regime. A giant crater scooped out of a mountainside in the jungles of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea, the $60 billion mother lode contains one of the world's largest single deposits of copper and gold...
...idea that a comet or asteroid might be bearing down on Earth--as in Deep Impact and Armageddon--can be traced to this crusading geologist. Probing Arizona's Meteor Crater in 1956, Shoemaker found a form of quartz that is created only by tremendous impacts. Finding the same telltale mineral in other craters, he concluded that they had been formed not by volcanoes, as most scientists thought, but by large objects hitting Earth. It was only a matter of time, he said, before Earth would be struck again. So he launched the first organized search for big incoming objects, recruiting...
...Luis and Walter Alvarez speculate that an asteroid's crashing into Earth 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs and other species. In 1991 the putative impact crater is found beneath Mexico's Yucatan peninsula...