Word: dusts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rest of the small satellites, which made the fresh-looking pits on its surface. Cosmic rays and other high-speed particles bombarded its surface, riddling the material with microscopic holes. This beaten-up stuff is only an inch or so thick, says Kuiper, and it is not dust. He thinks it would feel underfoot "like crunchy snow...
...meteors, and it may have been built up entirely by such accretion. But he does not think that the smooth, dark areas that are called maria (seas), because early astronomers thought they were exactly that, are filled with lava. He thinks that they are low places full of fine dust that was removed by a kind of erosion from the moon's highlands. In some places it may be more than a mile deep...
...water on the moon, so Gold's erosion cannot be like the kind that wears down earth's mountains. He thinks that the chief eroding agent is high-energy radiation from the sun helped by cosmic rays and meteorites. They slowly chewed a flour-fine dust from the moon's exposed rocks and kept it stirred up so that it gradually flowed into low places like the interiors of old craters and the maria...
Whether Gold's theory is correct or not, it threw something of a scare into space-minded military men who hope some day to land on the moon and do not like the idea of sinking into a mile of loose dust. Their fears were calmed by simple tests made in the laboratories of their contractors. North American Aviation, Inc., for instance, shows two sealed glass tubes. One of them contains air as well as fine dust, and a small steel ball sinks deeply below the surface. The other has a vacuum. The dust particles, no longer lubricated...
...Urey still thinks that the clouds in the Venusian atmosphere may be made of water droplets like clouds on earth, but few astronomers agree with him. Dr. Kuiper thinks they are made of fine dust particles of carbon suboxide (0302). In an attempt to prove this theory, he made a mixture of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and exposed it to assorted radiation at the Argonne National Laboratory. Sure enough, carbon suboxide formed, and its molecules stuck together to make particles of yellowish polymer...