Word: meteorically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Encouraged by optimistic astronomical forecasts that suggested the annual Leonid meteor shower might well be more dramatic than usual (TIME, Nov. 18), a team of University of Arizona students ascended nearby Kitt Peak to observe the spectacle, What they saw exceeded their wildest expectations...
...nothing unusual at the last two predicted returns. They concluded that the swarm had been de- flected slightly by the gravitational pulls of Jupiter and Saturn. No one knows if the orbit has now been shifted back. The only indication that it might have is that the regular yearly meteor shower has been steadily increasing for the last three years...
...Meteor Bombardment. The Russians confirmed that Luna 9 had found no dust on the moon. Instead, it hit a surface that consisted of hard, porous, volcanic soil formed from lava that had crumbled during billions of years of drastic temperature changes and bombardment by meteors and solar particles. Inhospitable as it is, such a surface could probably bear the weight of both heavy space vehicles and men. The major obstacle remaining before man can fly to the moon, concluded Soviet Academy of Sciences President Mstislav Keldysh, "is the problem of returning a cosmonaut to earth. I think it is easier...
...Russian object has decayed, leaving the total number of man made objects in the sky at a mere 1515. Tonight will be the peak of the Taurid meteor shower which will appear to radiate from the constellation Taurus high in the southeastern...
...pictures showed 70 clearly distinguishable craters ranging in diameter from three miles to 75 miles; a few appeared to be rimmed with frost. If the Mariner sampling is representative, Mars may have at least 10,000 craters of the size shown in the pictures, compared with fewer than 200 meteor craters that can still be seen on Earth. - The planet's pock-marked surface, judging by what is already known of the moon's face, must be ancient-perhaps 2 billion to 5 billion years old-and well preserved. Scientists infer that Mars has never had a significant...