Robert Charles Kerman was born on December 16, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father was a pickle maker and his mother did bookkeeping for the family business. He grew up in a in a middle-class Italian-Jewish neighborhood of Bensonhurst, sharing a two-family row house with his aunt and parents.
Modular Pack Mine System (MOPMS) MOPMS is a man-portable antitank/antipersonnel (AT/AP) mine system with command detonation capability. It weighs 165 pounds and contains a mix of 17 magnetically fuzed AT mines and four AP mines. Its 4-hour self-destruct command can be recycled three times or command detonated by remote control. The Remote Control Unit can control up to 15 MOPMS dispensers from a distance of 300 to 1,000 meters. The munition is well suited as a protective obstacle for light forces but can be used for tactical purposes as well.
On the eastern edge of the Mojave Desert, an hourâs drive southwest of Las Vegas in Mountain Pass, California, lies a 1.4-billion-year-old deposit of cerium, neodymium, and other metals that is the richest source of rare-earth elements in the United States.We know what the [total] concentration of rare earths is in all areas of the deposit,â says Molycorp mine manager Rocky Smith, standing on one of the tiers carved into the 800-foot-deep pit and pointing out an ore-laden rock; itâs tinged mauve with bastnaesite, bastnÃ¤site a mineral that contains a mixture of rare. earths