Word: lunar
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...flawlessly, providing 1,000,000 Ibs. of thrust and boosting the rocket to an altitude of 115 miles before it, too, was jettisoned. Now it was the turn of the third-stage S-IVB. Firing its engine, it inserted itself, the attached Apollo spacecraft, its service module and the lunar module-a total of 140 tons-into orbit, with an apogee of 119 miles, a perigee of 114 miles. It was an impressive demonstration that, after ten years, the U.S. had finally overtaken and surpassed Russia in brute rocket power. The heaviest loads ever orbited by the Soviets were...
...exulted NASA Planetologist Donald Gault last week. By means of the Surveyor 5 spacecraft, man had reached across a void of some 240,000 miles, studied the surface of the moon, and analyzed its chemical composition. That analysis, scientists reported last week, indicated that part of the lunar surface is strikingly similar to the earth...
...alpha particle "jewel box" (TIME, Sept. 22) is virtually the same as the basaltic rock that forms the ocean floors and is found in such widely scattered locations as the Hudson River Palisades, the Brazilian Plateau, the Hawaiian Islands and India. Like its counterpart on earth, the lunar material consists largely of oxygen (58%) and silicon (18.5%). It also contains aluminum (6.5%), iron-nickel (5.5%), magnesium (3%), and smatterings of carbon...
Surveyor's findings are admittedly based on tiny samples. The spacecraft's alpha-particle analyzer covered only two 4-sq.-in. areas and probed them to a depth of only 1/1,000th of an inch. And it is conceivable that the lunar highland regions have a chemical composition different from that in the Sea of Tranquillity, where Surveyor landed. But scientists believe that Surveyor's findings are typical of the makeup of the other lunar seas, or basins...
...basaltic character of Surveyor's samples has strengthened the belief of many scientists that the floor of the Sea of Tranquillity was formed by extensive lava flow. Such flow, they say, could emerge only from a lunar interior that was-and could still be-hot and molten. The earthlike characteristics of the lunar surface also support the theory that the moon and earth were part of the same pre-planetary dust cloud when the solar system was young, but later split to go their separate ways...