Last week's challenge
Start with the phrase CALM WEATHER. Rearrange the letters to spell a five-letter word for a part of an airplane and a six-letter word for a place you see airplanes. What are the words?
Answer: WHEEL and TARMAC
THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: “Heavenly bodies”
On-air questions: OK, Mike, as you may have heard, just before 3:30 p.m. on Monday, we here in the Northeast will experience a rare total solar eclipse, with northern New York in the line for a full view of totality, assuming the weather cooperates that day. In honor of Monday’s eclipse, today’s show is all about the skies.
1. From its discovery in 1930 until a pivotal vote by the International Astronomy Union General Assembly in 2006, it was included on a list of nine. What is it?
2. Getting ready for a regular but rare event the following year, five women took part in a December 1985 interview, recalling where they had been in 1910 to see what?
3. A word translated as “peace” or “world,” what low earth orbit body in operation from 1986 to 2001 predates the International Space Station and came online seven years after Skylab’s tenure ended in 1979?
4. Thought to be swirling for much, much longer, a cloud storm 10,000 miles wide has been observed on Jupiter for the last 200 years — over which time it has been seen to be shrinking. What color is it?
5. The first word transmitted to earth from the surface of the moon in 1969 was a U.S. city name. What was the second word, also used in the address of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama?
Extra credit
1. Named for the gods of fear, what planet has two moons, one of which is fated to break up or crash into the planet 50 million years from now?
This week's challenge: Start with the last name of a screen actor. The first two letters of this person’s last name are also the first two letters of a real person the actor portrayed in 2023. Who is it?
ANSWERS
On-air questions
1. After its demotion to a dwarf planet, getting “Plutoed” was voted as the word of the year.
2. Halley’s Comet, which next returns in 2061. As part of the interview archived by Oregon State, Maybelle Wheeler recalled being an 8-year-old in Lincoln, Neb. and being frightened of the sight of the comet, with locals talking abut the end of the world like in scripture.
3. MIR (At one point MIR was occupied for 3,644 straight days)
4. Red (Jupiter’s Great Red Spot) (According to NASA, the storm’s gravity is so severe that it jostled a spacecraft when it flew by going 130,000 miles per hour in 2019)
5. Tranquility (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of the Apollo 11 mission decided to name their landing spot Tranquility Base)
Extra credit
1. Mars (Phobos and Deimos; Phobos is known as the “doomed moon”)
