Word: meteoroid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1963-1963
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...space-conscious laymen, the very word meteoroid is heavy with menace. It conjures up visions of rocklike objects streaking the sky as shooting stars, moving at such enormous speeds that a lump as big as a pea could punch a fist-sized hole through any spacecraft. Scientists, who have calculated the probability that a spacecraft and a meteoroid would collide, are less worried than laymen, but even so, they have planned on protecting long-range space vehicles with meteor bumpers. Now it seems that spacecraft will need no such shields. Space is indeed teeming with meteoroids, but most of them...
Cosmic Dust. This reassuring news was delivered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with the authority of a firsthand report. For seven months, the satellite Explorer XVI orbited earth, inviting meteoroids to hit the instruments that encrusted most of its surface. There were cylinders of thin sheet metal containing helium gas that escaped when they were punctured by a meteoroid. There were instruments that gave an electrical signal when sunlight showed through a puncture hole in plastic film. There were also sensitive microphones that registered 15,000 occasions when something hit them hard enough to make them vibrate...
Only at rare intervals, though, did Explorer XVI collide with anything bigger than a microscopic bit of cosmic dust. There were 44 meteoroids that succeeded in penetrating a sheet of beryllium-copper one-thousandth of an inch thick, which is slightly thicker than household aluminum foil. The most powerful meteoroid encountered knocked a tiny hole in stainless steel three-thousandths of an inch thick. Metal as thick as the wall of a beer can went unpunctured. NASA's tentative conclusion is that the plentiful meteoroids are too small to do harm, and the dangerous ones...