Word: meteor
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Encouraged by optimistic astronomical forecasts that suggested the annual Leonid meteor shower might well be more dramatic than usual (TIME, Nov. 18), a team of University of Arizona students ascended nearby Kitt Peak to observe the spectacle, What they saw exceeded their wildest expectations...
Similar displays were seen all over the U.S. Southwest. One meteor so illuminated the skies over New Mexico that it cast shadows on the ground. Astronomer Nathan Fain, at the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory, called it a "historic shower," possibly greater than any in the past...
...observers were not so lucky. A blanket of haze and clouds covered much of the East Coast and completely obscured the view of crowds gathered for the occasion in Manhattan's Central Park. Astronomers on a plane circling above the weather off Nantucket Island reported only about 20 meteor sightings in an hour. They missed the celestial show of a lifetime. Another spectacular Leonid shower is not expected again until...
...nothing unusual at the last two predicted returns. They concluded that the swarm had been de- flected slightly by the gravitational pulls of Jupiter and Saturn. No one knows if the orbit has now been shifted back. The only indication that it might have is that the regular yearly meteor shower has been steadily increasing for the last three years...
...Meteor Bombardment. The Russians confirmed that Luna 9 had found no dust on the moon. Instead, it hit a surface that consisted of hard, porous, volcanic soil formed from lava that had crumbled during billions of years of drastic temperature changes and bombardment by meteors and solar particles. Inhospitable as it is, such a surface could probably bear the weight of both heavy space vehicles and men. The major obstacle remaining before man can fly to the moon, concluded Soviet Academy of Sciences President Mstislav Keldysh, "is the problem of returning a cosmonaut to earth. I think it is easier...