Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The layer of loose rock resting on bedrock, constituting the surface of most land.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun ‘Blanket-rock’: in petrography, a term applied by Merrill (1897) to the covering of loose material resting upon the solid rocks of the globe. It is derived from the decay of rocks, accumulations of vegetation, talus, debris, and sediments of all kinds.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun geology The layer of loose
rock , dust, sand, and soil, resting on thebedrock , that constitutes the surface layer of most dry land onearth , themoon , and other large solid aggregated celestial objects. There can also be sub-marine regolith.)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Deimos appears mostly smooth due to a covering of powdery rock called regolith, which is reddish in this color-enhanced picture.
unknown title 2009
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Schultz said the silver molecules detected were in atomic form - loosely attached to grains of lunar soil, or "regolith" - and were not the kind of deposits that could be mined.
What's the moon made of? NASA mission finds it's nothing so simple as cheese. Marc Kaufman 2010
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Over this weekend, NASA just held a competition in California with $750,000 in prizes for anyone in America who could move the most "regolith" --- or moon dirt --- with a robot.
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Over this weekend, NASA just held a competition in California with $750,000 in prizes for anyone in America who could move the most "regolith" --- or moon dirt --- with a robot.
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Schultz said the silver and gold molecules detected were in atomic form - loosely attached to grains of lunar soil, or "regolith" - and were not the kind of deposits that could be mined.
The Seattle Times 2010
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Over this weekend, NASA just held a competition in California with $750,000 in prizes for anyone in America who could move the most "regolith" --- or moon dirt --- with a robot.
SpaceRef Top Stories 2009
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Over this weekend, NASA just held a competition in California with $750,000 in prizes for anyone in America who could move the most "regolith" --- or moon dirt --- with a robot.
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Competitors were required to use mobile, robotic digging machines capable of excavating at least 330 pounds of simulated moon dirt, known as regolith, and depositing it into a container in 30 minutes or less.
Launches and Dockings and Robots, Oh My! | Universe Today 2009
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Andrew Steele of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC, and colleagues shone a green laser at a sample of moon rock, known as regolith, collected by the Apollo 17 mission 40 years ago, the light signal that was returned revealed a crystal structure consistent with whiskers of graphene.
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Since actual lunar rock, known as regolith, is scarce, the students used volcanic ash from a deposit on Earth along with various minerals and basaltic glass, similar to rock on the lunar surface, according to Eric Faierson, a doctoral student who led the Virginia Tech team.
innovations-report 2009
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