Paul stark, age ll, of Aurora, Minn., for his question:

What are tektites?

This glassy little stone is a mixture of ordinary minerals found in the earth's crust, and an up to date rock collector surely has one in his collection. But its history may be very extraordinary  for many experts suspect that it may be a grounded space traveler from another world.

Rock collectors have been finding these unusual looking little stones for ages. Recently mineral experts analyzed some of their odd features and became very excited. They began to search around the world for more tektites. They were found on five continents, and although there was no shortage of the odd stones they seemed to be scattered over limited areas.

To look at the average tektite, you would suspect that someone had been trying to cook up a batch of candy from the rocky minerals of the earth. It may be shaped like a ropy loop or bar, a ball or a button or a tear shaped gumdrop. It may be chocolate brown, licorice black or minty green. But the glassy little stone is very hard and chances are its glossy surface is wrinkled with ridges and pitted with holes.

Analysis revealed that tektites are related to the meteorites that fall upon the earth from interplanetary space. Many of them have been dated and proved to be very old. A scattering of 700,000•year old tektites was found in Australia and another of the same age in Asia. Others aged l5 million years were found in Europe, and in North America tektites of 30 million years have been found.

The ages and the groupings of the odd stones set the experts to wondering about their origins. They Were created when minerals actually Were cooked to melting point, and their strange shapes formed when scraps of the molten material were tossed through the air. A comet or a large metorite could whack the ground with enough force to create a batch of scattered tektites. Its impact could melt the minerals of the earth's crust to instant lava and hurl around fragments to cool and solidify into twisted atones. But not all experts agree with this theory.

Some suggest that tektites wham down from space like showers Of meteorites. The face of the moon is pitted by monstrous meteorites that may have hurled fragments of molten moon material out into space. The space traveling fragments: would cool and solidify and perhaps some of them fell on earth to become the odd stones we call tektites.

Another theory suggests that ancient meteorites blasted vast gobs of material from the moan. Chunks weighing millions of tons may have been captured into orbit around the earth. In time, the big chunks were perhaps shattered by gravity and pulled down to the ground in showers of tektites. As yet we are not surf of their origins. But they may well be a sample of minerals from the lunar landscape.