Word: pitting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Looking at it from the other end. a spaceship that starts its voyage on the surface of a planet has a hard time climbing out of its gravitational pit. Once it has reached untroubled space, it can coast for millions of miles on its unopposed momentum...
Near the rim of the earth's gravitational pit is a much smaller pit belonging to the moon. An object shot away from the earth at 24,800 m.p.h. will reach the boundary, about 34,000 miles short of the moon, where the moon's pull is as strong as the earth's. If it reaches this point with a small velocity, it will fall on the moon. If it crosses the line at good speed, it will shoot past the moon, its course merely deflected. This is what happened to the Lunik...
Solar Orbit. The earth and moon, whirling around each other, are not alone in space. They also orbit around the sun, and so do the other planets. A gravity chart of the solar system shows an enormously deep pit, the sun's, with much smaller pits in its slope, one for each planet. When a spaceship has climbed out of the earth's gravitational pit, it is still deep in the sun's pit. This does not mean that it will fall into the sun. Besides the comparatively small speed contributed by its own engine, it also...
...Foot Pit. Hurrying home to his tiny, rented straw-mat room in an overcrowded shack on the city's outskirts, Kawamura eagerly told his fellow tenants what he had learned. Sure enough, they remembered that there was an old tombstone in the field, so deeply buried that only its top showed above the earth. Nobody knew whose grave it was. It had always been there...
...much bigger job than he-had expected. By noon Kawamura had dug down 6 ft. of earth and uncovered one face of the tombstone-a massive slab 1 ft. thick and 4 ft. wide. Apparently bent on a rest, he started to clamber out of the 6-ft. pit. But. at just that moment, the huge gravestone toppled forward and crashed down on the luckless Kawamura. What the fortuneteller had prophesied had, in a fashion, come to pass: Kawamura's bad luck was at last at an end. He was dead...