Word: meteor
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...that attempts to land on them. Dr. Kuiper thinks that regions splashed with rocks tossed out of big craters should be studiously avoided, but other parts of the lunar plains are probably smooth enough for landing. An encouraging sign is the comparative scarcity of small primary craters blasted by meteor impacts...
...earth and its nearby partner the moon live in an orderly neighborhood; only at vast intervals, millions of years apart, is the area blasted by trouble. Then a giant meteor, perhaps a wanderer from the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, streaks into range. If it happens to hit the earth, it blasts a crater many miles across, sometimes melting nearby rock and spewing out slaglike material called impactite. If it collides with the moon, the crashing meteor produces glassy objects called tektites, which many scientists believe are knocked out of lunar craters, solidified in space...
...tektites found in Canada and the U.S. All proved to be 34 million years old. Impactites from the Clearwater Lake crater in northern Quebec and from far-off Libya have the same age. Other tests show that tektites found in Czechoslovakia pair up with impactites from an ancient meteor crater in Germany. Both are 15 million years old. An impactite from Tasmania is 700,000 years old, the same age as tektites found in Australia, Indonesia and Southeast Asia...
...that a lump as big as a pea could punch a fist-sized hole through any spacecraft. Scientists, who have calculated the probability that a spacecraft and a meteoroid would collide, are less worried than laymen, but even so, they have planned on protecting long-range space vehicles with meteor bumpers. Now it seems that spacecraft will need no such shields. Space is indeed teeming with meteoroids, but most of them are fluffy stuff, harmless as thistledown...
...Whatever interpretation conjure women may have put on the story that stars fell on Alabama, it is not legend but fact. "The night the stars fell" was Nov. 15, 1833, when a meteor shower put on a spectacular display remembered for a lifetime by those who witnessed it. My great-great-grandfather (no conjure man, but an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania) was sufficiently impressed that he gave his daughter, born in Montgomery that night, the name Mary Meteora...