Word: meteorics
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...Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, veteran Racing Driver Ab Jenkins warmed up his old Mormon Meteor, which has carried him to world records at every distance from 50 kilometers (at 172.92 m.p.h.) to 1,000 miles (at 172.8 m.p.h.), for a last fling at some new records. On the twelfth lap around the twelve-mile course, hitting 200 m.p.h., the Meteor skidded and mowed down a line of wooden markers before Jenkins could straighten out. As the car began to heat up and smoke, because of a punctured radiator hose line, Jenkins braked to a stop and jumped...
This weird optical system enables the camera to cover a 52° field, taking in one-tenth of the area of the visible sky. Where earlier meteor cameras were blind to any meteor smaller than a marble, the new model will photograph the tracks of meteors as small as buckshot. As soon as a duplicate camera is completed, the meteormen can compare their films and tell by triangulation the distance and altitude of each meteor trail...
...Meteor study is also useful to missilemen in another way. When meteors shoot through the air, they get white hot and most of them evaporate. This same thing happens to some extent with guided missiles. The German V-2 actually lost some of its metal by evaporation while descending through the atmosphere. By learning more about this effect, the meteormen hope to help the missile designers keep their "birds" from evaporating...
Like the Transverse Panoramic Camera (TIME, March 12), the meteor camera is a product of the Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., founded in 1939 by Richard S. Perkin, a bored Wall Street man whose hobby was amateur astronomy. Teaming up with another amateur astronomer, Charles W. Elmer, he was soon turning out such optical oddities as prisms of poisonous thallium iodide (for infrared work), as well as flame photometers and infra-red spectrometers...
...fishbowl lenses of the meteor camera almost stopped even Perkin-Elmer. "When we first saw the plans," said Perkin, "we thought we would be nuts to tackle it." But their job turned out almost too well. The camera forms a star image so small and sharp that it hits only one or two grains in the sensitive emulsion on a photographic film. As a result, the camera must be used slightly out of focus to make star images big enough for easy study...