Word: meteored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most of the moon's hidden face is covered with what appears to be mountains, which always look brighter than seas. The Russians named one conspicuous series the Soviet Range; the rest of the area is probably, a Jacqwork of circular meteor craters. The published pictures were taken at almost "full moon" from Lunik's point of view, i.e., with the sun directly "overhead." At such a time, even steep slopes near the center of the moon's disk cast no shadows and are therefore hard to photograph. Other pictures may show many more craters, cracks, valleys...
...Holes & Meteors. The apparent scarcity of seas on the far side of the moon will keep moon experts theorizing for many years. The seas are really flat, low plains filled with dust or lava. They must have been formed rather late in the moon's history, because few meteor craters pit their surfaces. Astronomer Gerard Kuiper of the University of Chicago thinks that the seas were made by the impact of asteroids up to 90 miles in diameter, which blasted great holes in the crust at a time when the moon's interior was hot and plastic. Dark...
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...