Word: lunar
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...moon-like the earth -was stratified and geologically alive. Now, says Geophysicist Gary Latham of Columbia University, investigators think that the patterns may have been caused spuriously by the seismometer itself. Yet, even while it seemed to be working well, says Latham, the seismometer detected only infrequent, relatively small lunar rumbles. He accounts for that odd seismic behavior by speculating that the moon contains a large amount of cold, fragmented material that would diffuse any shock waves...
...surprisingly, one of the few jubilant scientists in Houston last week was Geochemist Oliver Schaeffer, who led the team that calculated the age of the lunar material. He used potassium-argon dating, a method based on the rate at which radioactive potassium decays into argon (it takes 1.3 billion years for half the potassium to decay); as time passes, the ratio between the potassium and argon in a specimen changes at a known rate, thus revealing the approximate age of the sample. If there is any error at all, Schaeffer explains, he has underestimated the age of the rocks, because...
...Earth. Though the Lunar Receiving Lab's examination will continue until the rocks are released from quarantine this month, it has not yet answered any of the basic questions about the moon's origin. But if the moon is actually proved never to have had a molten interior (the maria melting could have been caused by meteor impacts), scientists would be hard put to sustain one of the theories of the moon's creation: that it was torn, cataclysmically, from a hot earth. On the other hand, a cold moon does not upset either...
...most ancient rocks found on earth are 3.3 billion years old, or more than a billion years younger than the planet itself, and the moon rocks from the Sea of Tranquillity are about the same age. Nonetheless, Urey and other cold-moon proponents think that when men reach the lunar highlands, which are generally considered to be older than the maria, they will find material as old as 4.5 billion years-or almost as old as the solar system itself...
Today, with nearly every notable 19th century industrial structure in Western Europe safely preserved on film, the Bechers look forward to focusing more on objects of the future. The one such object that they see as "utterly representative of its period in man's history" is the spidery lunar module that successfully carried men to the moon...