Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Taken by the high-resolution camera aboard Lunar Orbiter 2 from a point only 28.4 miles above the moon's surface, and about 150 miles south of Copernicus, the picture gave scientists a fresh slant on one of the moon's most prominent craters. For the first time they could, in effect, peer over the rim of Copernicus and get a close-in look at its walls, floor and central mountains-areas they had seen through earth-based telescopes, but only from directly above. The new look may have already shed new light on the processes that formed...
These clues strengthen Kuiper's belief that Copernicus was formed by the impact of a comet, one of three or four that have hit the visible side of the moon during its 4½-billion-year lifetime. He estimates that the comet weighed a million million tons, had a nucleus ten miles in diameter, and crashed into the moon at a speed of 35 miles per second. The explosion produced by the stupendous collision was intensified by the comet's high content of ice expanding into steam on impact. The resulting blast produced a crater 60 miles across...
...heat of impact and the resulting steam penetrated deep into the moon and formed a pool of molten material that later solidified as the crater floor. The hot lunar material and huge chunks of rubble floating in it, says Kuiper, created the volcanic structures that can be seen in Orbiter's picture...
Ironically, Orbiter's shot of Copernicus was merely a byproduct of its assignment to photograph 13 possible lunar landing sites for astronauts. Of the 211 photographs it has taken while orbiting the moon, Copernicus and twelve others were shot for "housekeeping"-to advance the roll of film and keep the camera in working order during long intervals when Orbiter was not over one of the possible landing sites. Though NASA did not release any of the other housekeeping shots by week's end, an astronomer who was allowed to see them reported that those taken while the satellite...
Orbiter is scheduled to complete the tedious transmission of its pictures by Dec. 10. Shortly afterward, having carried out a practically perfect mission, it will be ordered to fire its retrorocket, drop out of orbit and plunge to destruction on the moon below...