Word: luna
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...Russians had arrived with a proposal to name more than 150 of the farside features shown on their chart, mostly for Soviet scientists and space pioneers. But American scientists, who have tentatively accepted Russian names for a few of the more definite farside features first photographed in 1959 by Luna 3, argued that it would be premature to name the remainder until Orbiter 5's pictures are used to prepare definitive and complete farside charts. Of the 18 features named by the Russians from Luna 3 photographs, noted University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper in urging a delay, only...
...orbiting the moon last April, Russia's Luna 10 achieved a first that the U.S. is striving to match. The Soviet spacecraft apparently lacked photographic equipment, and the U.S. now aims to take the lead by orbiting the moon with five picture-taking satellites in a row. Last week Lunar Orbiter 1 soared up from Cape Kennedy and successfully zeroed in on its 237,500-mile, 92-hour trip to the moon...
...earth, it passes through the magnetic tail once a month. The passage, which takes two or three days, occurs around the time when the moon is full, on the opposite side of the earth from the sun. Because the moon was full on April 5, only two days after Luna 10 went into lunar orbit, the Russians presumably detected an almost immediate rise in the number of electrons, then a sharp drop-off a few days later as the moon passed out of the tail...
...solar wind may also be responsible for the moon's magnetic field reported by Luna. Scientists believe that charged particles from the sun induce tiny electric currents in the moon. These, in turn, generate a weak magnetic field which-like the earth's-is probably distorted into a cometlike shape and may even have its own collection of energetic electrons for Luna to detect. The presence of these electrons would be characterized by a peak of radiation every three hours-each time Luna passed through the lunar tail on the antisolar side of the moon...
...Luna's discovery of high concentrations of electrons near the lunar surface caused an immediate flurry of press reports about possible danger to future manned moon missions. These were quickly brushed aside as "unfounded speculation" by University of Iowa Physicist James Van Allen, discoverer of the earth's radiation belts. Electrons with the energies reported by Luna were so "soft," he said, that they "could not even penetrate a thick piece of tissue paper...