Word: meteor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Their eyes glued to the skies, the monitors at the U.S. missile-tracking stations in the South Atlantic searched the darkness one night last week. Suddenly they gaped; far above, starbright and hell-hot, a thing-it looked like a meteor-plummeted through the stars of the heavens and then disappeared over the horizon. Hours later in Washington, U.S. spacemen announced the news: Big Joe, the funnel-shaped prototype of the vehicle that will carry the first U.S. man into space in 1961, had been shot aloft in a test and had been recovered intact. Had a man been inside...
...dropping faster and faster through its gravitational field was a small, alien object: a metal sphere blazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. Perhaps no one will ever know what happened when it hit. It may have dug an invisibly small crater among the natural meteor craters on the moon's scarred face. Perhaps it splashed a brief fountain of dust. Whatever it did, the moon could no longer serve as a symbol of unreachability. Man had sent an object from the earth and pitted its virgin surface...
...frogman, described the sight. Said Guion: "It looked like an extremely large shooting star, very white and blinking. It was a little sun falling down." Said Foy: "The light was a lot more intense than the moon. It was almost painful to look directly at it.'' The meteor flared through the sky, disappeared behind a cloud bank, blazed forth below. It slowed down, dimming its light and blooming two parachutes, dropped into the sea about five miles from Kiowa. This was what the tug, along with a pair of escort destroyers, had been waiting for. Kiowa pitched...
...Geophysical Year grants from the National Science Foundation. The whole concept of setting aside a year or eighteen months for special cooperation in the sundry fields of science was so broad a project that it touched people whose whole lives have been dedicated to research in specific areas--oceanography, meteor study, or sunspot work, for example...
...discovery--a startling correlation between the movements of five earth satellites and radio wave emission of the sun--is the most marked relation between solar and terrestrial phenomena ever found. The man behind this important find is a good-natured, gray-haired man named Luigi G. Jacchia. A meteor expert by trade, Jacchia may be found more often than not hunched over a drawing board plotting graphs in a small corner office at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory building on Garden St. Fittingly, it was his drafting work which led to his discovery of the correspondence of the two phenomena...