... Aurora . ... William Gilbert The north-south pointing property of the compass needle was discovered in China around the year 1000, and in 1600 William Gilbert in London showed that this could be explained if the entire Earth was a huge magnet. ... Only after 1958, when the first scientific spacecraft were launched and when Explorers 1 and 3 discovered the radiation belt, did scientists fully appreciate the complexity of electric and magnetic phenomena that occur in the Earth's magnetic environment. ...

Educator's Guide to Impact Craters . ... Just about all craters have deep central depressions, raised rims, and a blanket of ejected material surrounding them. ... Look for classical cratering features: basin, raised rim, ejecta blanket (material excavated from the crater and dumped around it, visible as white flour on the colored powder), and rays (material shot out at high velocity forming lines pointing directly away from the impact site). ... The material lies like a blanket around the crater. ...

... Spacecraft . ... To space by cannon? Finally, the deep space explorers --spacecraft which break away from the Earth's gravity . ... The "Luna" series of the USSR conducted 7 soft landing of unmanned probes, two of them with wheeled robotic "Lunokhods," and two of those missions returned samples to Earth. Others spacecraft have visited the major planets of the Solar system. ... The Mariner series have explored Venus and Mars--and Mariner 10 even reached Mercury, for three separate encounters! ...

Cosmic Research, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 435­488. Translated from Kosmicheskie Issledovaniya, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 453­508. Original Russian Text Copyright © 2004 by Veselovsky, Panasyuk, Avdyushin, Bazilevskaya, Belov, Bogachev, Bogod, Bogomolov, Bothmer, Boyarchuk, Vashenyuk, Vlasov, Gnezdilov, Gorgutsa, Grechnev, Denisov, Dmitriev, Dryer, Yermolaev, Eroshenko, Zherebtsov, Zhitnik, Zhukov, Zastenker, Zelenyi, Zeldovich, Ivanov-Kholodnyi, Ignat'ev, Ishkov, Kolomiytsev, Krasheninnikov, Kudela,