Word: meteorically
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...