Word: meteor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kohman rejects both these theories. He analyzed tektites and found that they contain considerable amounts of radioactive isotopes (beryllium 10 and aluminum 26) that are formed by cosmic rays in space. This rules out the moon, he says. If tektites were splashed out of lunar meteor craters, they would have to come from at least a small distance below the moon's surface, where they would be sheltered from rays...
...tektites in each of the patches, which are hundreds or thousands of miles across, are different, and none of them have any relation to the earthly rocks near them. One popular theory holds that they are chips knocked off the moon by meteor impacts. Another argues that they are nonmetallic meteorites intercepted in loose swarms that melted into a kind of glass when they hit the atmosphere...
When the nose cone hit the atmosphere after its arch through space, its tip got so hot that it glowed like a star. It was, in effect, a man-made meteor that gradually lost speed by air friction. When its speed was low enough (figure secret) to eliminate further heating, a lot of things started happening fast...
...almost certainly covered with lava that poured out on the surface billions of years ago, said Astronomer Gerard Kuiper of Yerkes Observatory. In those days, Kuiper told the astronauts at Denver, the moon's interior was kept liquid by radioactivity, so any disturbance, such as a large meteor impact, was likely to cause an upwelling of lava. Kuiper thinks that smooth places on the maria will make firm landing spots for earth's spaceships...
...optimistic was Astronomer Thomas Gold of Harvard. Gold pointed out that the ring-shaped meteor craters on the moon can be given comparative ages by the way they overlap, and that the walls of the oldest ones are generally low. This means, said Gold, that during the 4 billion years or so of the moon's life, its exposed rock has been slowly turned into dust by bombardment of rays and particles from the sun and space. The dust, kept stirred up by the same agents that formed it, has flowed like a slow liquid into the moon...