Word: lunar
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...barren desolation of the Badlands of South Dakota. But when it was flashed unexpectedly onto a screen at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Boston last week, sophisticated space scientists and engineers recognized the terrain immediately. It was a spectacular closeup shot of lunar landscape. That photograph of the moon's Crater of Copernicus, said NASA Scientist Martin Swetnick, is "one of the great pictures of the century...
Taken by the high-resolution camera aboard Lunar Orbiter 2 from a point only 28.4 miles above the moon's surface, and about 150 miles south of Copernicus, the picture gave scientists a fresh slant on one of the moon's most prominent craters. For the first time they could, in effect, peer over the rim of Copernicus and get a close-in look at its walls, floor and central mountains-areas they had seen through earth-based telescopes, but only from directly above. The new look may have already shed new light on the processes that formed...
Stupendous Collision. To University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, one of the world's leading lunar experts, Orbiter's photograph seemed to confirm his theory that the 1,000-ft.-high mountains in the center of Copernicus were partially formed by volcanic activity. Scattered over their slopes, he says, are humps similar to the cinder cones found on major terrestrial volcanoes. The picture also clearly shows that the floor of the crater is remarkably flat. To Kuiper, this indicates that the subsurface was once in a fluid or plastic state, and that it solidified, causing the crater floor...
...heat of impact and the resulting steam penetrated deep into the moon and formed a pool of molten material that later solidified as the crater floor. The hot lunar material and huge chunks of rubble floating in it, says Kuiper, created the volcanic structures that can be seen in Orbiter's picture...
Launched on a near-perfect trajec tory toward the moon, Orbiter 2 briefly lost and then regained its navigational lock on its guiding star Canopus; other wise it was not bothered by glitches. As it sped toward the moon 93 hours later, some 2,770 miles above the lunar sur face, Orbiter's retrorocket fired, slowing the craft enough for lunar gravity to draw it into an elliptical orbit...