Monday Meanderings - 4.1.2019

Here's a blog entry that will be of interest only to myself. Sorry about the rest of you.

I'm currently narrating 2 audiobooks; both are "behind the scenes" books. One is about the development of the the atomic bomb and the role it played in ending WWII. The other is about the Apollo 8 mission to circumnavigate the moon - the first manned spacecraft to leave the "earth-sphere."

 In the first book, I needed to find out how to pronounce the name of one of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project. After a good deal of searching, I found a YouTube program that mentioned him by name - but the reference had nothing to do with his earlier war-time project.

Instead, he was cited as the individual who came up with key evidence that there had been a cataclysmic meteor event eons ago - you know, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Okay. My work is done. I know know how to pronounce his name. But the video about the meteor was interesting, and I ended up staying up way past my bed time to watch the whole program.

In the video, after the physicist had posited that a thin, near world-wide layer of a rare element - Iridium - could only have been distributed by the effects of a colossal meteor strike (colossal, as in the size of Mt Everest), it became incumbent on researchers to find the crater that such a strike would leave.

They did locate the crater - which involved most of the Yucatan Peninsula - by looking at the read-outs of petroleum companies, which have scanned much of the globe using instruments on aircraft  that looked for geographic anomalies that suggest the presence of oil.

This instrumentation is a by-product of NASA moon orbits, first used on Apollo 8 (and described in detail in my second book) to measure "mascons" - mass concentrations of meteoric activity on the moon, which skewed NASA's gravitational maps and needed to be identified and measured for later lunar landings.

And to find the crater of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs in an explosion that made the first atomic bomb seem like a fire cracker.