Word: moone
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like the moon and it isn't," said Donald E. Gault, one of the scientists monitoring the Mariner data at NASA'S Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. The pictures showed that Mercury's craters are much flatter and thinner-rimmed than the moon's and resemble giant pie pans-an indication that they may have been worn down by some yet-to-be-identified erosional process. Like most of their lunar counterparts, Mercury's craters were apparently created by impacts of asteroid-size chunks of material rather than by volcanic eruptions. Indeed, one crater...
...photographs show no mountains similar to the moon's, but there are indications of several great escarpments or cliffs, some of them hundreds of miles long. More puzzling still, there are distinctly nonlunar bumps, hillocks and rills. Some of the rills are remarkably straight, while others twist and turn, almost as if they had been carved out by flowing water. One photograph reveals two overlapping craters with a flow of material-possibly lava-on top of them. That would suggest a period of lava flows that may have followed a major bombardment from space...
Nearly five years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Sea of Tranquility, many questions about the moon remain unanswered. Indeed, some scientists feel that they may never completely learn the origin and history of the earth's immediate neighbor. Yet as a result of painstaking analysis of the 838 Ibs. of lunar rocks and the wealth of data collected by six Apollo crews, a fundamental understanding of the moon as well as of the early years of the earth is now finally beginning to emerge...
Lopsided Orbit. Usually obscured by the bright glare of the sun, Mercury remains almost as much a mystery as the most distant planet, Pluto. Half again as large as the moon, Mercury may be almost twice as dense. Traveling in a lopsided orbit, it comes as close to the sun as 29 million miles, then sweeps as far away as 43 million miles. To anyone standing on Mercury's surface, the sun would seem to stand still at times, then move backward briefly, in the Mercurian sky. Another oddity: Mercury's trip around the sun takes 88 earth...
...Like the moon, Mercury apparently has no appreciable atmosphere or magnetic field. Its surface, bombarded by intense solar radiation, may be quite dusty. Recently, radar astronomers suggested that Mercury has mountains as high as 4,000 ft., rolling hills and valleys, and some lunar-like craters, some of them perhaps of volcanic origin. Surface temperatures are far more extreme than those on either the moon or Mars. At the height of the Mercurian day, they may reach 940° F., more than enough to melt lead. At night they plunge to - 350° F. No living things could be expected...