Word: lunar
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...weeks, have probably been scrutinized more closely than any other material in the history of man. Special, clean, sealed laboratories, some far cleaner and more sophisticated than those at Harvard, have been built all over the world for the sole purpose of studying a few pounds of lunar dust and rock...
...same extensive analyses already carried out on the Apollo 11 and 12 samples will be done on the new material. Then, at the end of July, Apollo 15 will bring back still more samples which, after undergoing six weeks of preliminary examination, will also be distributed by the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, Texas. Although Harvard's allotment will be small, the techniques used for studying the samples require very little material and much time. Considering the relatively short time between reception of the Apollo 14 and 15 samples, Clifiord Frondel, professor of Mineralogy and head of the investigating team...
...July 28, 1969, Frondel opened the first box of lunar samples as the world waited, open-mouthed, for his verdict. The world was disappointed. Immediate sight identification was made impossible by the adherent lunar dust covering and hiding the rocks. Frondel later remarked that the rocks were so covered with dust that, "You couldn't tell if they were Swiss cheese or granite...
Even as their own Mars vehicle raced toward its goal, the Soviets had another reason to be pleased. Six months after its landing, the eight-wheeled moon rover, Lunokhod I, was still continuing its lunar explorations, digging up soil samples with a conical drill and analyzing them with on-board instruments. It was also photographing the moonscape and scanning the heavens with an X-ray telescope that has already detected at least two sources of X-ray emissions in distant space. So overjoyed were the Russians by Lunokhod's performance that Pravda was moved to proletarian metaphor and compared...
...that it spends on nuclear-power research to study ways to take the sulfur out of coal smoke. But even if coal could be cleaned up, the cheapest method of digging it out of the earth is strip mining, which turns large expanses of natural beauty into scenes of lunar desolation. Gasifying coal underground so that it can be moved easily by pipeline offers one way to make fuller use of the nation's resources; the feat is technically possible, though at present it is expensive...