Word: moons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bottom Ignorance. The discovery of valuable ore so close at hand is an ironic reminder of how little man knows about the oceans around him. Although scientists have photographed and successfully mapped the hidden backside of the moon, 240,000 miles distant, and made other great strides millions of miles away in space, they have taken only faltering steps in the nearby depths of the seas. No known point on earth lies more than seven miles beneath the surface of the ocean, yet not much more than 5% of the ocean bottom has been explored...
NASA's $350 million Surveyor program has already tested the bearing strength of the lunar surface and scouted all the proposed flatland target sites for the U.S.'s first manned moon mission. This was accomplished spectacularly in four out of six shots; Surveyor's budget authorized seven. What to do with the last moon robot? As a sort of job-end bonus for a mission brilliantly accomplished, NASA left it up to a panel of lunar experts. They decided to gamble on an exploratory shot to one of the moon's unknown upland regions: the rock...
Jewel-Box Glitch. Tycho's significance lies in the fact that it is one of the moon's youngest and major craters. From its 15,000-foot depths, a pattern of grooves or ridges spokes out over hundreds of miles of the moon's pock-marked surface. The scientists hoped to compare the composition of this terrain with that of the low-lying basically basaltic equatorial "seas," studied by earlier Surveyors. Since Tycho is believed to have been formed by the impact of a giant meteorite, and by the intense volcanic activity that followed, a look...
...weapons have shown how easily the treaty's restrictions on orbiting weapons are circumvented. It is difficult to see how the treaty's other provisions against warfare on the moon and the planets will fare any better...
Electric Slippers. Seki began his career by making a telescope from an old magnifying glass and a lens he found in his father's pawnshop. He was stunned by the sight of craters when he first turned his telescope on the moon, and has been star-struck ever since. Beginning his observations in 1950, he patiently peered through a variety of homemade telescopes for eleven years without finding anything new. He was on the verge of surrendering and concentrating on his $150-per-month job as guitar instructor when he spotted his first new comet in the constellation...