[meteorite-list] NP Article, 03-1964 Tektites and O'Keefe

From: MARK BOSTICK <thebigcollector_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:18:25 2004
Message-ID: <OE97lHAUcgw8yTZzapQ000118e7_at_hotmail.com>

Paper: The Marion Star
City: Marion, Oh
Date: Saturday, March 28, 1964
Page: 5

Not So Silvery Moon
By Earl Ubell

     If you wander across certain fields in Southern Australia, you may stub
your toe on a clump of of the moon. In picking up the offending stone,
you'll find it a glassy, black piece f matter that looks like a carved
botton off a woman's coat. Scientists call such stones tektites, from the
Greek, Tektos - meaning molten, because they appear once to have been liquid
stone.
     You can find similar buttons in Martha's Vineyard, Georgia, Texas,
Africa, Czechoslovakia and throughout Southeast Asia. There must be tons of
the stuff scattered over the earth. Measurements of their radioactivity
reveal that those in Southeast Asia are between 600,000 and 700,000 years
old.
     According to Dr. John A. O' Keefe - a physicists and this nation's
unofficial warden of the tektite situation - they all came from the moon;
evidence supporting this thesis piles up daily.
     Dr. O'Keefe, who works at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the
National Aeronautics Space Administration, summarized this evidence in the
Febuary issue of the Scientific American. Simultaneously Dr. Dean R.
Chapman, of NASA's Ames Research Center, announced his successful efforts to
create artificial tektites in a high speed wind tunnel.
     Not all scientists believe that the button-shaped black rocks came from
the moon. Some think that huge meteorites - chunks of matter from the solar
system - splashed into the earth and created the tektites. But Dr. O'Keefe
rejects the idea.
     If the tektites did come from the moon, then Dr. O'Keefe draws several
conclusions: The moon must be a chunj that was torn loose from the earth 5
billion years ago or else it is a twin of the earth formed at about the same
time. It cannot be a stray planetoid that was captured by the earth's
gravity.
     DR. O'KEEFE'S case rest on a chain of circumstanital evidence that may
be verified when we get a piece of the moon stuff from the hand of an
astronaut returning from out natural satellite.
     First, analysus of the tektites show that the minerals came from
meteoritic materials; i.e. they came from beyound the earth.
     Second, although tektites contain radiactive elements, they do not
contain aluminum-26, which other meteorites have. Aluminum-26 is found in
ordinary meteorites as they wander for millions of years in the solar system
and are bombarded by cosmic rays. Tektites can only have wandered for
10,000 years or so at the most but the clues say they came directly from the
moon.
     Even so, the clues could suggest a terrestrial origin. Here is where
Dr. Chapman and his wind tunnel come in. Dr. Chapman put together the same
materials as is found in a tektite and exposed them to a high speed wind
tunnel with heated air. The stream of air carved the same ridges as the
scientists find in natural tektites. From this it was possible to determine
the speeds at whcih the tektites enter the earth's atmosphere; 4 to 7 miles
a second. Such speeds are most likely extra-terrestrial.
     HOW DO such things arrive from the moon; how do they get those enormous
velocities? Explanations; Meteorites smash into the moon hourly just as
they do on earth. But the moon has no atmosphere to slow them down; they
hit with full speed - from 1 to 10 miles a second.
     When that happens, the impact is an explosion which scoops out some
moon matter and sends it flying in all directions. Some fo this matter than
reaches even greater speeds than the impacting meteorites and at velocities
which tear it from the moon's gravitational forces.
     Caluclations by NASA scientists show that more material leaves the moon
as a result of meteor impact than arrives. That means the moon is
shrinking.
     (All of this raises a side issue for future moon landing astronauts.
Impact from the meteorites must create large showers of high-speed
projectiles at great distances along the moon's surface. This creates a
danger for our moon men something like being exposed to the hail of machine
gun bullets.)
     Dr. O'Keefe believes that when the tektites approach the earth, they go
into orbit and slowly enter the earth's atmosphere just as John Glenn's
capsule did. The heat of re-entry creates the carved surface of the
tektites and distributes them like the wreckage of a spent rocket.
     Finally, because of the material in the tektite bears such a great
resemblance to earthy minerals - except for the meteoritic character - Dr.
O'Keefe suggests that the mon matter is like earth matter. Well, in a few
years we'll find out for sure.
Received on Tue 04 Feb 2003 11:50:41 PM PST