Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...days, while 200 NASA scientists and technicians photograph, weigh, catalogue, chip and even burn them. Particles of the samples will be tested on living cells, including those taken from fish and from a human cancer. Other particles will be fed to a variety of earth life, such as Japanese quail, algae, sunflowers, pine seedlings, oysters, white mice and cockroaches?the last chosen because they are one of the hardiest insects known to man, having survived as a distinct genus for millions of years. All the organisms involved were painstakingly bred and raised in germ-free conditions. The mice, for example...
...environment that makes the moon so hostile to terrestrial life is, paradoxically, precisely what makes the moon so potentially valuable. The absence of atmosphere, which exposes any life on the moon to deadly radiation and the inhospitable vacuum of space, also makes the moon an ideal base for observatories and some industries. Meteors which have battered the lunar surface for eons have probably also endowed the moon with immense mineral wealth. Although lunar days and nights are each two weeks long and accompanied by deadly extremes of temperature (ranging from 240 degrees Fahrenheit above zero to 250 below), both...
...they are a blank page in the history of our planet. If the age of the rocks on the surface of the moon turns out to be 4.5 billion years, we may learn the answer." One of the most important parts of the answer concerns biogenesis, the beginning of life, which occurred on earth more than three billion years...
While the geologists, chemists and physicists are busy with their investigations, other scientists will be on an even more exciting quest. Biochemists will be examining the specimens for evidence of amino acids and protein molecules?the building blocks of life. Paleontologists will seek fossil remnants of organisms. At NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., still other investigators will try to coax life itself from the lunar rocks, using nutrients in the hope of resuming a life process that might have been interrupted millions of years...
Command Pilot Armstrong is considered tight-lipped and phlegmatic, even in the notoriously taciturn fraternity of astronauts. "Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer," his wife Janet said in an interview with LIFE. "The word no is an argument." Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell...