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About The Oregon daily journal. (Portland, Or.) 1902-1972 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 21, 1921)
Experiment with Projectile He Would r Satellite (Continued from Preceding Page) f transfer of the water to the land surface In the form of snow, ' - At length, was reached a stage where for lack of winds that bad any carrying power, the water evaporated by the run of the lunar Summers was deposited as snow immediately around and along the banks of the seas and other water spaces. In stead of being borne afar. Thus, In the course of time, hundreds of thousands of years probably, -were formed the tremendous cliffs, thousands of feet high, which wall the so-called craters. j- Once. upon, a time every such crater was a lake or pool of water. It might be said! that.' pools and lakes are not usually circular. Neither are the; cra ters on the moon. As already stated, they are of all kinds of Shapes. ' - - The modem high power Jtele scope gave us our first oppor tunity really to study the moon. The. - earliest observers J per ceived on its surface large" drab uued splotch A which theyj, sup- posed to be seas. We now know that they are vast plains. But they are plains j sur rounded by precipitous ; and lofty walls. They are, In fact, mere "craters'' of enormous size. " . Once upon a time they really were seas. They; are ancient bowls from which the water has taken flight in the form of white flakes settling upon the dry surface of the land, -were 5 shallower than They j our oceans, averaging not more than halt a mile in depth. The seas were the main source of snow supply, and hence the most enormous era sers are the former sea-basins. And around . their borders on all sides, therefore, tand high walls of snow, some of them very precipitous on their Inward faces, but in all cases sloping off gradually on the out side toward the general surface of the moon. During 'each lunar " Summer, .with Its fortnight of continuous jparm sunshine, a good deal of the snow melts and the water seeps back into the basins. ' Having done so, it again undergoes the process of evapo- ' ration, 'and, because there ! is no wind to carry the snowflakes (into which the vapor Is converted a few days later), most of the pnow remains to restore and heighten the . bid surrounding walls. ' . " One thing that has putzled astronomers , Is why the hugest mountains and mountain ranges rise In the relatively f eatureless" plains, where craters are fewest. It Is a matter of easy explanation, :vj ' When those great walled plains were occupied by seas in other words, when . the lunar oceans were fullIslands doubt less rose here and there above the surface Of the water. Situated as these Islands were in the very heart of the principal snow-producing districts, they naturally accumulated, "by the process already de scribed, Immense loads of snow.. They were crowned, in the course of ages,;! by heaps of lee and snow which now tower thousands of , feet, even miles, toward the sky. .' : - ; ' In this way, on a long island, was formed the great lunar range known as the Apen-' nines, which, extending for a distance of 450 miles, contain no fewer than 8,000,; peaks, one of which. Mount Huyghens, at tains an altitude Of three and a half miles. That range is built, at least mainly, of Snow and lce -. .' , Thej same may be said of another 'im- portant range, the lunar Alps, which has TOO peaked mountains, and is remarkable for a tremendous valley 184 miles long and five miles broad. Much of Its heaped-up ice and snow doubtless came from' this troughs originally the bed of a mighty river; or perhaps, a long arm of the sea. , Similarly, the lunar Apennines Valley is merely the vacant trough of a sound which anciently separated the . above-mentioned long island from the mainland. . Imagine the long and narrow island of . Cuba : to undergo such rapid seasonal changes as occur on the moon. Suppose, further, that stiows from one brief .Winter to another should keep on accumulating until they were piled miles high. What a wonderful "mountain range" " It would make, and how like the lunar Apennines! Fancy some strange freak of nature by which all the waters of our oceans, lakes and rivers should be concerted into snow and settle upon our continents and islands. Reach THE OREGON SUNDAY JOURNAL, PORTLAND, SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 21, 1921. V tt. w ?4 - Suggestions of the Various Paths the Moon Rocket May Follow on Its Journey, Accord ing to Its Velocity. 4 .'-St, f 7i" C fV never to return again to their ancient beds. ; What a weird and. wonderful spectacle our planet would present! - - ,Thi3 is exactly what has happened on the moon. .It Is why her surface' is so magnificently and so strangely sculptured,' It is why we see no rain clouds upon her; ! why her atmosphere has disappeared,' buried In the snow. Why has no t the same thing comeJto pass on frigid Mars?' Because that planet -revolves in front of the sun every- twenty four hours (or about that), as the earth; does. It has therefore no seasonal alterna-. tions like those of the moon. V " . It will be understood, then, how, on the moon, deep ponds have become cavernous craters islands hare grown Into mountains i and mountain' ranges, rivers have erected); their level banks into precipitous gorges, and great lakes have disguised themselves as walled plains. All of these remarkable : features are the work of Jack Frost, I 1 The craters, which from our viewpoint;, bear an undeniable resemblance to the - -mouths of terrestrial Yolcanoes,are thou-, sands in number. On our planet the larg est volcanic crater is that of Haleakla, in ; Hawaii, wAch is seven miles in diameter. : But some of the lunar craters are over 100 : miles in diameter, and from that sise they Tange down to small' ones -hardly discern-' . Ible through the best telescope. . v ' The above statement of maxiiSum size, ; be it understood, does not take Into ac count the great plains, formerly ses, beds, -- which, as already said, are themselves vast craters surrounded by ofty cliff-Walls. , i . Every one of the craters has its en circling wall. In some- cases four or five miles high. The deep ones have bottoms (often level as a floor) much below the " general level of the moon's surface. It is as if a giant had dug a well and piled the ' excavated material around Mia fcrtm. nnm the inner face of the wall is so precipitous as to be almost vertical: but no matter how steep this inner face, the outward slope away from the crater's mouth Is in variably a long and gradual slant. The mdst interesting craters present the aspect of immense walled amphitheatres. Scattered over the floors of some of them are smaller craters, and in many Instances tall mountains shaped like gigantic sugar loaves rise from the level plain which the cliff-wall eacompasses. ; v This latter feature has been particularly Duzsling. to astronomers, wlin tmm hn t a loss to hit upon any plausible explana- tion. o uooaeni mac ine Idea of inow-transfer. is grasped both the sugar loaf mountains and the subsidiary craters are easily accounted tor. - - Suppose the original exltpnp nt iavA Its disappearance, through evaporation and transfer to the land in the form of snow, was gradual. As the process continued the surface level of its water lowered, bringing into view here and there dera tion of th bottom wMsh. em&rslnjL b. v .. : 1 ; I r . , . f V' .v : A Remarkable Reconstruction of an Immense (Crater on the Moon Called Ptolemaeus. So Large Is This Indentation That All of Man hattan Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Many Hundreds of Square Miles of New Jersey and, New 'York Could Nestle in It With Ease, as the Accurate Relief Map Within the Walls Show, r Bp Courtety of the Bray Pictures Corporation, New York: oamenslands. As soon as theseeleva- tions became dry land they began to accumulate snow, and, being most favorably situated for that purpose in the midst of a large snow-producing area, they gathered snow with a maximum rapidity. And in the course, of time the snow was bound to assume upon. them the form of lofty to wars, veritable icy mountains, of a more or less sugar-loaf pattern, ' So much for the sugar-loaves. Now sup pose (as must have happened) the evapora tion to continue until the bed of the lake was dmost dry. There would still be pits here and there, depressions, containing water. As evaporation went on, sowry dry ing up this residue of water, snow would be deposited around the edges of the pits. The process, exactly the same as that al ready described, would convert these pits into lesser wailed craters rexactly such minor craters 1 as are scattered over the floors of many of the big craters on the moon. ; - ' . - It might be said that every dent in the moon's surface that anciently contained water has become a crater by the conver sion' of Its 'fluid contents into snowflakes and the settling of the latter on its brim. Hence there .is no reason to be surprised at the extraordinary number of craters seen on' the lunar landscape. ' The telescope can discern on the moon an object the size of a city block, but noth ing smaller than that. We can, therefore, see only craters that are of considerable ,slze. Probably there are mutltudes of lesser ones too small to be distinguished. It is noticeable that the floors of many lunar craters are deep below the level of the normal surface of the moon, whereas 'those of terrestrial volcanic mouths are Invariably much higher.; And the deeper the' crater the higher are the walls en circling it because the water in the orig-" lnal lake or pool was deeper, supplying more vapor to make snow, which, with no - winds to scatter it, settled on the encom- passing walls and added progressively to their height. Notwithstanding what has been said, the atmosphere of the moon has not wholly departed. There is stffl some of it left, though it must be extremely thin. What there is of It can carry moisture. Pro fessor Pickering, the famous Harvard as tronomer, has written of clouds of vapory fog or mist which he has seen sweeping across the rast plains called "seas. On one occasion he saw the lunar ridge of Teneriff e "steaming from end to end Other astronomers, observing these tranz oecnrreneeH- bnv t rimtut m j to "noxious gases escaping from volcanio ; Teats." . . . The crater called Mostinr A l 4t i. in diameter and 3.000 feet deen. with . floor of brilliant whiteness. But with the arrival of the lunar Summer a dark spot appears on the' floor, growing In slaer to a breadth of about a mile. There are other large craters in which at the same sea sonal period similar spots are observed, (Q UH, Xntntaaaal rattan Barrio. Id . - - i , " " "" ' '.' ' - 1 ' ' . , . l . '. 4 , . - ..." , : V; AU " ; - . . ' which disappear with the oncomlnr of the lunar Winters. -V ; , Very curious. What may we suppose these spots to be? The answer is easy. They are water from the k melting of the encircling snow walls bf the craters water that seeps down to the lowest leve in the middle of the crater and -forms a pooL targe areas of .the great plains called "seas" darken with the advance of each lunar Summer, but resume their normal 'lighter color in the lunar Autumn. Water -again, from melted snows.'' The spots In the craters and the dark areas on the plains disappear In the. way described because the water is evaporated by, the sun. to be thereupon converted into snowflakes and redeposited on the dry sur faces of the moon. ; Some of the snow, of course, falls Into the water; -but the water covered areas steadily shrink, leaving more and more of the surface bare until all of' it is dry. .The snow has no chance to ac cumulate In any Quantity on those areas, and what does remain is quickly melted and evaporated in the early lunar Spring. The atmosphere of the moon Is so thin that wate,on that orbTnay be supposed to boil at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and evaporation must be rapid at a point not much above freezing. The mists of vapor observed- by Pickering and' others are doubtless produced by the evaporation of ' the temporary pools. ' . , " ' . t ' ' - For the production of snow on the moon we do not need to Imagine clouds. ' Nansen nd other explorers have testified that in Arctla latitudes the transformation of at .mospherlo vapor Into snow is accomplished . directly "and without clouds. In those re- fions-a fine-dusty snot is often precipi tated' from the air when the sky is cloud less. .. : ;.'. ;- It is interesting in this connection to Quote Professor Russell W, Porter, who ? writes: "Having spent many years above the Arctic Circle,-1 swas struck by the strange likeness of the moon's general -aspect to our own polar regions. The long reaches of the frozen-polar ocean, trav ersed by Immense- ridges and cracks, the dazzling whiteness and clear-cut shadows, the desolation and loneliness all seemed to find a counterpart In the lunar land-, scape." v . -' Professor Goddard's project of commu nicating with the moon opens x up the in teresting possibility that more of its at mosphere may be liberated from the snows and our satellite thus made habitable. It would not be possible absolutely to verify the Ideas here set forth without making a journey to the moon, landing upon Its surface and examining it. " If the moon can some day be reached by a rocket, as Professor Ooddard suggests. It will be the most momentous achieve ment of science. When the national Gov ernment wastes countless millions every year and people give blindly to such dubi ous things as the Red Cross it will be strange if the necessary funds cannot be found to finance Professor Goddard's In teresting experiment. - - Cast zttala 9gt 1 . Wit. -si IBB II. Professor R. H. Coddard, Assistant Professor of Physics at Clark Uni- versity, - Massachusetts, and the Vacuum Pipe in WhicE He JetU with a Small Model of His Appar--atus the Conditions Which His Rocket Would Hare to Encounter on Its Way. to the Moon '- While Professor Goddarddoes not. ad mit that he contemplates sending human passengers to the moon at present, be came that might raise too sanguine ex pectations, the theory of his invention makes that achievement possible, and it is evident that that Is the ultimate object - of his plans. In that case the fanlastla. adventure described in Jules Verne's "Trip . to the Moon" would become a reality, as so many of the other imaginative -visions of the great scientific novelist have done. All the details have been thought out for making' the moon rocket a comfortable . vehicle for passengers. She would have a powerful double steel envelope, with vacuum chamber to compensate for the changes in atmospherlo surroundings. Oxygen would be -tarnished by a tank within the machine as in submarines. v Professor GoddardU skyrocket was rec ognized as an Implement of great military possibilities during the war and would have been used if hostilities had continued k iew monus longer, ine rocxet as fle-, signed was capable of remaining In the air for-a. flight of 200 miles and could have been employed to causa very destructive (Ax.. "''V: K v. A Model of Professor God - -dard'a Projected Moori Rocket With Which He Has Been Experimenting and, demoralizing effecU behind th enemy's lines. In order to obtain valuable results front sending the rocket to the moon It would "be Tieceisary that competent scientists should make the trip and take photo graphs.' Whether they could go on a tour of exploration on the moon's surface ap pears to be a separate problem, as an air satellite is believed to have no atmosphere capable of supporting life. In that case. It would be necessary to make special vehi cles in which the scientists could travel about the moon. - ,v ; Even the preliminary dispatch' of a rocket to the moon without a human pas-' senger would be an occurrence of great interest and scientific value. It . would prove the possibility of sending men there. It should not be difficult to record the arrival of the1 rocket, on the moon's sup face. With our most powerful telescopes the moon Is now broughV within an appar ent distance of fifty miles of the earth. An object 500 feet in length would be read ily visible at that distance. ' The rocket would be designed to dls- - cnarge a heavy explosion of black smoke upon striking the moon's surface. This cught to be seen and reported by such, telescopes as tsa ona ai MnW wnn and several others.- "tt MX--.. i V- 'V. - " J . . - - 11 ,- . - iji t . . . - If! 'v'f y , ! , , . . ' It -- r -
