Word: meteorically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...equipment bay on the other side of the LM, the busy spacemen will remove EASEP (for Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Payload). They will set up one part of the package?a laser-beam reflector?some 70 ft. from the LM. The other experiment, a seismometer for measuring moonquakes and meteor impacts, will be placed 10 ft. farther away. Both will be left on the moon for the benefit of earthbound scientists (see following section...
...immediately from the instruments that the astronauts will leave behind on the moon. As soon as Astronaut Aldrin sets up a seismometer on the lunar surface, for example, a command radioed from earth will activate it by releasing four suspended weights. In the future, whenever a quake or a meteor disturbs the lunar surface, the seismometer's frame will vibrate, while the suspended weights remain immobile. The seismometer, sensing the relative motion between the frame and the weights, will express it as digital data and transmit it to earth. The instrument is so sensitive that it will even register Astronaut...
Others are more concerned. Although he agrees that organisms might survive a moon fragment's entry into the earth's atmosphere, Cornell Exobiologist Carl Sagan is less confident that they could live through the heat generated by a meteor impact on the moon. For that reason he has doubts that lunar organisms have ever reached the earth and that terrestrial life has already proved its immunity. Sagan, like most other scientists, believes that the odds are high against life existing on the moon. But he cautions that there is "an exceedingly small risk of possibly great harm...
...return to earth, Apollo 10 scored a near bull's-eye landing just three miles from the recovery carrier. TV camera crews aboard the Princeton first caught a spectacular view of what probably was Apollo 10's jettisoned service module, glowing like a blazing meteor as it streaked across the predawn sky before being completely consumed by the more than 5,000° F. heat of reentry. Then, silhouetted against the lightening sky, the bulbous command module came into view, dwarfed by the trio of 83-ft.-wide parachutes that slowed its descent. As the module drifted down...
...oxygen or nitrogen-or thrive in salt water -they could begin to spread and multiply. Most scientists agree that the chances of life on the moon are remote, and some believe that any moon organisms would have reached the earth long ago on particles ejected from the moon during meteor impacts. If they are wrong, however, and Apollo 11 returns to earth with unexpected visitors, NASA's revised plans may well be inadequate to cope with them...