RocketSTEM Issue #12 - July 2015 | Page 35

a fracture where the mare surface “opened” like a cooling joint. “But since the scientists have studied the pictures,” Irwin wrote, “the most popular theory is that Hadley Rille was probably a lava tube that collapsed.” All around the two men were enormous slabs of basalt and the geologists in the back room in Houston quickly began pressing for them to move further downslope, though Joe Allen was becoming nervous. Looking at televised pictures, it seemed to him as though they were right on the edge of a precipice. In fact, the rille had no dramatic “drop”; rather, it resembled the gentle shoulder of a hill, and t