Word: meteor
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...seconds one night last spring, the blinding flash of a huge meteor lit up the sky over central Mexico. A short time later, a B57 sped to the scene from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N. Mex. Its mission was to collect any debris that might still be adrift after the fireball's searing entry into the earth's atmosphere. For the second time in history, investigators had been alerted quickly enough to seek such dust, which provides invaluable clues to the origin and chemical makeup of meteorites...
This glass was probably formed from meteor impacts that splattered molten rock across huge distances, Frondel said. These impacts may also send shock waves comparable to those from an atom bomb blast through the lunar soil, melting some particles into a glass...
...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 of the two other major moon-origin theories: that it was formed...
...white polar caps composed of frozen water or, as many astronomers believe, dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide)? Do those long controversial "canals" really exist, or are they optical illusions? The 1965 flight of Mariner 4 showed that Mars is pocked by moonlike craters, apparently as a result of meteor bombardment. But the unmanned probe did not determine whether Mars can support anything remotely like earthly life...
Other stages of the flight had been ?and would be?dangerous enough. At any point during the eight-day journey, a massive failure of the electrical or oxygen systems, or a collision with a large meteor would almost surely result in tragedy. But lift-off was the most nerve-racking part of the mission. If the ascent engine had failed to start, Eagle would have been stranded on the lunar surface. Too short a burn would have tossed the module into a trajectory that would send it smashing back onto the lunar surface. Had the LM achieved an orbit...