Word: lunar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more disappointed than Nobel Laureate Harold Urey, 76, when the 55 Ibs. of lunar samples brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts turned out to be igneous or heat-formed rock, possibly of volcanic origin. Long a champion of a "cold" moon-the theory that it has never had a molten core like the earth's-the University of California chemist sadly admitted that he could have been wrong. The moon, he conceded in the face of the rocks, might be hot, or geologically active, after all. "Poor old fellow," said one of NASA's younger geologists several...
Last week, as the first phase of the rock analysis neared completion in Houston's Lunar Receiving Lab, it was Urey's young critics who seemed to have been wrong. Though they were correct in saying that the samples gathered up in the Sea of Tranquillity had once been molten rock, they appear to have been far off the mark in estimating their age. The rocks were not several hundred million years old, as many geologists had speculated, but at least 3.1 billion years...
...maria, or seas, were not created by relatively recent-and possibly continuing-volcanic activity. Instead, the maria had probably survived largely intact since early in the moon's life. Because the relatively uncratered maria are probably the last major features to have been formed on the lunar surface, the moon's appearance has remained essentially unchanged for billions of years. "It's something, isn't it?" Urey reflected last week. "Rocks sticking up above the surface . . . perhaps they haven't changed much since they were formed...
Geologically Akin. The scientists had erred in other ways. In the first exciting days after the lunar specimens arrived in Houston, they had suggested that the moon and the earth were closely akin in geological evolution and structure, and that the moon was made of earthlike layers. Now more careful study is showing that these initial ideas have almost as many holes as the moon itself. Not only have the rocks sprung such chemical surprises as an unusually high content of titanium, but the moon's seismic activity is also not what it had seemed...
...first, the data sent back to earth by two Mariner spacecraft more than 60 million miles away seemed to offer as little hope as the lunar rocks that life would be found elsewhere in the solar system. Flying past the planet Mars, the small, instrument-packed spacecraft detected no evidence of nitrogen, an indispensable ingredient of life on earth. Probing the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere, they failed to find anything like the ozone shield that protects the earth's surface from the sun's deadly rain of ultraviolet radiation. Even their stunning close-up photographs from...