Word: wasserburg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exclaimed: "Hey, there is orange soil. It's all over." Chugging toward him, Cernan shouted: "Well, don't move until I see it!" The astronauts' enthusiasm on the moon was shared by scientists watching in Mission Control's "back room." Caltech's Gerald Wasserburg jumped up from his fourth-row seat and practically pressed his nose against the TV screen to see the coloring for himself. NASA'S Egyptian-born geologist Farouk El Baz, who had helped train the astronauts, beamed proudly. Even the space agency's cautious Australian-born Geochemist Robin Brett...
...lunar rocks and soil, thousands of photographs and a flood of data that have changed some of man's basic concepts about the moon. But many of the mysteries remain. Indeed, the very act of exploration has created new lunar puzzles. "The moon," says Geophysicist Gerald Wasserburg, whose laboratory at Caltech has dated many of the lunar rocks, "is now giving us answers that we don't even have questions...
...earthly specimen-or any of the other lunar material brought back by Apollo 12. It contained 20 times as much radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium as comparable amounts of other moon material and was the oldest lunar specimen yet obtained. Radioactive dating tests made by Caltech Geologist Gerald Wasserburg indicated that the rock was formed 4.6 billion years ago-around the time that the moon and the planets arc believed to have been created. Scientists hope that further examination of the rock will provide new insight into the formation of the solar system...
...moon program can be kept on schedule. Indeed, the space agency got some rare encouragement to press ahead with Apollo from an often critical scientific community. Reporting puzzling age differences in lunar dust gathered at the Ocean of Storms and at the Sea of Tranquillity, Caltech Geologist Gerald Wasserburg made a strong plea at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union for continued manned lunar exploration. "The moon," he told the Washington conference, "will surely prove to be the cornerstone of our understanding of planetary evolution...
...Examination of the lunar rocks also established that catastrophic events rocked the moon about a billion years after its creation. "There were definitely lava flows 3.65 billion years ago," says Wasserburg. Scientists are still uncertain whether the lava rose from a hot lunar interior or was created by heat from the impact of huge meteorites. If the melting was indeed caused by meteors, a similar process might have occurred on the nearby earth. This could explain why scientists have been unable to find any terrestrial rocks older than 3.6 billion years-although the earth, too, is believed...