Word: meteorically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...would appear to be flying in the vacuum of the moon. Effortlessly they set up three scientific devices: 1) a solar wind experiment, consisting of a 4-ft.-long aluminum-foil strip designed to capture particles streaming in from the sun; 2) a seismometer to. register moonquakes and meteor impacts and report them back to earth; and 3) a reflector for measuring precise earth-moon distances by bouncing laser beams from earth directly back to the source...
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...
Valuable as the moon's vacuum may be, there are more palpable treasures. Some scientists, assuming that the moon was created when the earth was, some 4.5 billion years ago, calculate that about 10 trillion tons of meteors have fallen on the lunar surface. From their analysis of the composition of the relatively few meteors that reach the earth's surface (most are burned up by the atmosphere), they estimate that meteors have deposited 450 billion tons of iron, 30 billion tons of nickel, 10 billion tons of phosphorous, 9 billion tons of carbon, 6 billion tons of copper...