Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Using the same distance-measuring technique, with the moon as a reference point, scientists will, during the next several years, also be able to make precise measurements of the wobbling of the earth on its axis. This motion, called Chandler's Wobble, should tend to damp out with the passage of time, but is periodically reinforced by unknown forces?possibly earthquakes. More accurate measurements of the wobble with the aid of the laser reflector might someday lead to a technique for earthquake prediction...
...after centuries of wondering and theorizing, man is on the threshold of knowing. On the lunar surface, he may at last learn the secrets not only of the moon and its birth but also of the beginnings of his own planet and of the solar system itself...
...NASA geologists, and they have practiced collecting rock and soil samples in lunarlike terrain such as the Grand Canyon, California's Medicine Lake highlands, the Arizona meteorite crater, the arctic wastelands of Iceland, and Alaska's Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Even their on-the-spot descriptions of the moon, to be transmitted instantaneously by radio to earth, should be of substantial value...
Other scientific benefits will flow 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...
...timing the round trip of the laser beam, scientists will be able to fix the distance between the earth and the moon at any time to within 6 in. of the exact figure. This precise measuring rod should help answer a number of vexing scientific questions. By revealing previously unmeasurable variations in the orbit of the moon, for example, it should provide a better understanding of the nature of gravity. For if scientists can determine precisely how much the moon's orbit is increasing each year, they may finally be able to confirm?or disprove?the theory that the force...