“Only a handful of humans have ever seen the farside of the Moon. There was a time after the Moon’s formation when the entire surface was covered by an ocean of magma; the upper layer of this magma ocean crystallized to form a global layer of anorthosite. Since that time, impacts and other geological processes have broken and churned the surface, but the Dante Crater area may possess significant amounts of these original rocks.” —NASA, April 23, 2010
“Allan Sandage, Astronomer, Dies at 84; Charted Cosmos’s Age and Expansion”
“… In 1949, Dr. Sandage was a young Caltech graduate student, a self-described ‘hick who fell off the turnip truck,’ when he became the observing assistant for Edwin Hubble, the Mount Wilson astronomer who discovered the expansion of the universe.
Hubble had planned an observing campaign using a new 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain in California to explore the haunting questions raised by that mysterious expansion. If the universe was born in a Big Bang, for example, could it one day die in a Big Crunch? But Hubble died of a heart attack in 1953, just as the telescope was going into operation. So Dr. Sandage, a fresh Ph.D. at 27, inherited the job of limning the fate of the universe.
‘It would be as if you were appointed to be copy editor to Dante,’ Dr. Sandage said. ‘If you were the assistant to Dante, and then Dante died, and then you had in your possession the whole of The Divine Comedy, what would you do?'” [. . .] –Dennis Overbye, The New York Times, November 17, 2010
