Spacecraft-aided research discussed at geology Congress

A presentation of the Space Geological Map of the USSR turned out to be one of the highlights of the 27th International Geological Congress. A discussion of problems of satellite aided geology and comparative planetology was included in the program. B. N. Mozhayev, general director of the Aerogeologiya association, discussed achievements in this field. He said that structures whose existence could only be suspected by geologists in the past become visible on the Earth's surface from the altitude of an orbital flight. This pertains primarily to ring shaped structures hundreds of kilometers in diameter, and to linear transcontinental faults of the Earth's crust which are thousands of kilometers long. More than 4,000 structures have been detected from space on the territory of the USSR and entered on maps. Soviet orbiting stations, Soyuz spaceships and satellites of the Meteor and Kosmos series are equipped with photographic and scanning instruments. MKF-6 cameras, for example, are capable not only of distinguishing details only 15 kilometers in size in a locality; they also can determine the chemical composition of rocks on the basis of remote spectrograms.