Transcripts For CSPAN3 NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Apollo Program 20240714

At how the lab contributed to the Apollo Program and moon landings. What scientists learned about the rocks and other materials gathered during the mission. The event took place on the gpl campus in pasadena california. Welcome to Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory in pasadena california. I am preston dikes. Three human beings set out on a journey across a mortar dashed across a quarter of a million miles of space to the moon. Two of them sat down on a fragile set down on a fragile landing craft. For that one human being to make that small step took the focused efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Did not playch leading roles in the apollo effort. For all who contributed to wholo, as for all of us even play small role in the States Program today, the true reward lay not in the glory of the moment but to contributing to something greater. Jpls primary role during this festering apollo, deep Space Network was used to receive tv transitions from the moon. It was a vital communication backup, especially during the tense days apollo 13. Caltech, long a leader in the field of geology, contributed to the Field Training of the astronauts. We will hear just part of the apollo story, the road to apollo and how scientists at caltech and other institutions teased out some of the moons greatest secrets. If you are watching our live webcast you can submit questions by the youtube chat. Jpl is proudaker, to have an an Emmy Awardwinning speaker on its staff. The first nationally broadcast Television Series ever made about the space race. One of his key advisors was an apollo 11 astronaut who called spaceflight the real stuff. Astronomy. Ed to he was the executive producer of the astronomers. Is now he joined jpl and a fellow, working fulltime on films about jpls historic role in the expiration of space. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the highest offer highest honor nasa bestows upon a civilian. Enough, hiswasnt birthday just happens to be july 20, which is the very day apollo 11 made the first human landing on the moon. Willelcome bette complain. Welcome blaine. Good evening, it is fantastic to see you all here. Im delighted to see so many of you. My birthday serves as the day we first landed on mars with the viking. Something was meant to be. Maybe i better stop while im ahead. The more i have come to understand the moons of the solar system, the more i appreciate them for their incredible diversity. Hyperion looks to me like a seashell. Looks to me like a ufo. If we have any star wars fans the darkesthere is hour. Darkest hour. Dark star. Beautifuloon is a world with geysers that spring out into space. Titan, titan has rivers and lakes. Nasa has Just Announced an exciting mission called dragonfly, that is going to explore titan. The right is jupiters europa. Seen orld thought is see more h2o than in all the oceans on earth combined. Workis jpl, we are hard at on a mission to be launched to this world. There are almost 200 moons in the solar system. Moons and many others exist in the outer solar system. Mars has two very small moons. Venus and mercury have none. Only the earth has a sizable and beautiful moon. We all have one large moon why of all the terrestrial planets we have one large moon is a mystery. Its a great honor and privilege to share the stage with you. As for the present we are in the news not only because of the apollo 11 anniversary. Nasa has declared we are going moon, the next up on our way to mars. Tell whether this is the latest case of us becoming moonstruck, and whether it is actually going to stick again. The biggest question is whether we will have the will, which translates into the funding to go. Technologies have come along way in the last 50 years. Learned about them helps to make the case of going again. Once it was thought the moon is bone dry. That turns out not to be the case. Missions have found evidence of water in the polar regions of the moon and craters, where sunlight in the shadow of craters where sunlight doesnt reach. There you see some examples of the water. If you wish to live off the land, you need water. India is scheduled for a new mission to the moon next week. It is a combination of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. Then there is china. China has made no secret in its interest of exploring resources of the moon. A chinese rover is now landing on the moon. Its an impressive technological achievement. If you know where the rover landed on the far side of the moon, but it is in a named after theodore carmen. I hope that name sounds familiar. It is none of other than the first director none other than the first director of jpl. I cant help but wonder other is selection of the crater somehow intentional in terms of where the chinese landed. Im not exactly sure what the message might be. Larger point im trying to make is we may be at the beginning of a new space race. A space race that is a multinational one. Speaking of space races, lets go back to the first one to understand how apollo came to be. To 1957. O go back we are going to watch a video clip from one of my documentaries, which i have myself to cut down. Could we roll the first clip . In october of 1957, the soviet union shocked the world with the launch of the first orbiting satellite sputnik. Response, vanguard, was also a surprising and spectacular event. Only one in auard was the long string of setbacks for the United States Space Program. In 1959,t to the u. S. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev made sure to underscore the disparity between the two nations. A scientific feat heavily capitalized on by red propaganda. It gave Solid Foundation to khrushchevs soviet achievement. Rested with hopes its newly formed space agency, the National Aeronautics and space administration. Given an assortment of technical facilities. One of them was the jet Propulsion Laboratory in pasadena california. Groups nasa inherited, jpl was a part, managed and staffed by one of the worlds most renowned engineering universities. Jpl was accustomed to a tradition of independence. Perspective, nasa was a newcomer with no portfolio. And thebuilt missiles First Successful u. S. Satellite one. Re when nasa asked pickering his ideas for the nations robotic Space Program, he responded with an ambitious plan that called for jpl flying an armada of spacecraft to the moon and nearby planets. Sputnik has been called americas pearl harbor. Placing greater emphasis on science and math in the classrooms, for which i suffered, to the extreme, the idea of setting off a nuclear to demonstraten americas technological capability. People in the United States toyed with this idea. People in the United States toyed with this idea. They included the father of the hydrogen bomb. Here, they explore this ideal to great depth. One aspect is to consider what might be derived by debris that may be scattered by an explosion. One of the research was a by the late carl sagan, who would become one of the worlds best known scientists and an outspoken critic of the nuclear arms race. Union continued to surprise and confound. When Nikita Khrushchev made the first visit of the soviet head of state in the United States, the soviets timed the trip to coincide with the First Mission to reach the moon, kind of rubbing our nose in it. They took this image of the far side of the moon. At the time it was a technological triumph. Eisenhower could only grin and bear it. 10 weeks after john f. Kennedy took office, the soviet union struck again. Address,ys inaugural it is suggested aloud that the soviets should explore space together. This memo direct ding directing Vice President johnson take, putting on a space lab, landing a rocket on idea. On, or any other if not, john if not john, why not . Johnson turned to nasa andnistrator james webb secretary of defense john mcnamara. With the only real hope to have the first person in space landing on the moon. A Human Mission to mars. Proposale practical went out and kennedy took it to and now made his very famous speech, proposing to land a man on the moon and returning safely to earth before this decade is out. Phrase not known as the the story of the phrase before this decade is out. It was a lastminute compromise. The address mentioned there was of 1967. E had 1967 stayed in, we would not be saying today that nasa met. Ennedys goal escapes, jplennedy was working on two moon products moon projects. Even crash landing on the moon turned out to be a lot harder than expected. Let me summarize what happened. Didnt work, ranger two didnt work. Ranger five didnt work. Lab regrouped. Year later they launched ranger six. It worked perfectly, except in the last few minutes, when his camera refused to turn on. No pictures meant another failure. 1964 was jpls darkest day. Crowdingy this room, out as many people as you see in this room were people listening to what was going on life. They had better luck with ranger seven. You are sitting in the same room with some of the people, some of the footage you are about to see of the same people. You have six rangers that failed. Jpl, this wasn really a catastrophe. Fear it was going to fall apart. Everybody pulls together and basically what can i do . Debacleonths after the of ranger six, jpl was ready to try once more. It had required working three shifts a day, seven days a week. Strain on everybody. Theres no telling what jpl would have been like or what would have happened to jpl. It was a sobering experience. Three days after lift off, jpls auditorium was once again filled beyond capacity with people and intention. Recorders weree started at both sites. We are anticipating turn on momentarily. We are five seconds from full power. We have full power on every channel. All tape recorders are recording. Video is very strong, seconds to impact. Impact, impact has occurred. Impact, we are functioning. Roger. Occurred, the auditorium erupted in a great cheer. People shook hands and hugged once in hugged one another. Engineer likened the event to a spiritual experience. Some people had smuggled in some champagne and champagne it was aere open area great celebration. Finally the now humble jpl workforce had succeeded. Camera recorded 4000 images that arent much to behold today, but at the time they were a thousand times better than, and than any image of the moon from earth. Here are some headlines to give you some sense. The relief of we had finally succeeded. Im interested in the two heard in the minor riot. I dont know the story about that. Surveyor was a much more complicated mission. Was about staying alive on the moon for some time. Lets just watch the video. That will tell more than i can. Of all the questions nasa wanted answered, the most important was knowing what the surface would be like for apollo astronauts. Was it solid or wood layers of and act like quicksand swallow them whole . Nasa had hoped the answers would come from surveyor. This was jpls first experience. Strugglingtor was for good reasons. Surveyor was far more technically challenging than the rangers. Spacecraft not only had to soft land on the moon, it had to do so autonomously. It is also expected to send back images of the lunar surface. That was a trying period. When we were growing up was the same time when hughes was growing up. We didnt always mesh. A trying time. The ergonomic shroud is off and grand bahama is tracking. As shown by the animated dots on the monitor, separation has occurred. Launch,urs after surveyor one was only 1000 miles with speedhe moon increasing as the moons gravitational attraction beckons. Ignition looks stable. Falling steadily. The vehicle was supposed to dter a fixed plated escent. That happens. Excellentare in condition, all things look good. 113 feet per second speed. Above the surface, the engines are supposed to shut off and drop to the surface. The engines dont shut off. And you could hear a pin drop. It worked. We are down. It is still transmitting. For the first time, unamerican spacecraft had achieved a soft landing on another Celeste Celeste tial part. And nasa had the answer to its question. Solid, andurface was suitable for landing by the apollo astronauts. This is actually my favorite surveyor image, because every single time i look at it, what i see in it is almost Neil Armstrong stepping off the lunar module. , its the shadow of surveyor one on the moon. Now, i do not want to be guilty of committing the sin of omission, so i want to acknowledge that the soviets were the first to land on the moon with lunar nine. It used airbags, which we adopted to go to mars. So it could be argued that this was actually a soft landing. At the time, it was not large enough to raise doubts about whether the lunar surface was able to bear the weight of an apollo lander, but it is comparison to make a between the lunar nine image of the moon and the surveyor image of the moon. We begin to understand that being first does not always necessarily mean being the best. What happens to the soviet union program, in part, was the first actually hindered their technological development. For completeness, i have to mention one more first by the soviets that few people know or remember. Would you believe me if i told you that the apollo eight notonauts would not were the first earthlings to fly to the moon and return to earth . Thats true. Thats a fact. Earthlingsthe first to accomplish that. Easy to make a joke of this, but this was a serious business, because it demonstrated that the soviets were very serious about sending cosmonauts to the moon. In the end, it never worked. Now, i would like to make one more connection between jpl and apollo. And it has to do with apollo 12. You haveobably if been watching any of the great documentaries that have been airing this week and on the that you probably know now the apollo 11 landed with only 20 seconds of fuel left, Something Like that. That is because the computer overshot where they were supposed to land, and they were headed towards a feel of field the boulders. Neil armstrong has to take control and find a safe place to land. The Mission Controllers were not going to let that happen again, they were going to pinpoint landing for apollo 12 and wanted to make sure they had a landmark to know where they landed. On the moon, everything was covered the same, so they decided to land next to surveyor three. In fact, what you see in front of you is my favorite alltime astronauts. The hide, on the horizon, you can see the lunar module, where they landed. He used sort of a hack saw take off the camera of surveyor three , and a piece of the scoop and brought it back. There was a sense, some scientists thought, with a ticket to the ground, that they found microbial life on the camera that had come from earth, on earth,neezed on it went to the moon, survived for three years and went back. That has been pretty much discredited now. They believe someone sneezed on it after it got back. [laughter] but whats important about it, this is the same time scientist werebig scientists beginning to understand that life is far more tenacious than we expected, and there was more possibility for searching for life elsewhere in the solar system. That, to me, is part of the legacy, also, of the moon landing, is that i believe, now to goe are working hard to the other moons in the solar system, to look for life, it is really one of the great quests of all time. To leave you with this image of two footprints one robotic, one human, because to go on the great quest we want to go on, it will take both. Thank you very much. [applause] outstanding. That was excellent. Thank you so much. With that historical background in hand, we will change gears to hear about some of the science of apollo. As you will hear, many of our elements in our understanding of the moon that we take to grant take for granted today were huge mysteries in 1969. Those mysteries required that new techniques and new scientific instruments be developed. After all, no one had ever studied a pristine sample from the moon before. Our next speaker is one of the people who helped fellow the new ways of studying the lunar samples from apollo 11. What he and his colleagues to completely transform our understanding of the moons history. Arden albee grew up in michigan and studied at harvard, receiving a phd in geology. He came to caltech in 1959 and retired after 50 years as a professor of geological and planetary sciences. During that time, and addition to teaching and research, he served as exteriors as chief scientist here at jpl. He served as project scientist for two years excuse me, for two Nasa Missions to mars. As well as serving on innumerable committees and boards for nasa and higher education. For a look at the science of the apollo lunar samples, please help me welcome dr. Barton albee. [applause] dr. Albee thank you. As you see, i have been around here for a long time. I wore this jacket because i found it in the back of the closet and there is a possibility i wore it 50 years ago. [laughter] wouldbee my daughters say, no way, but it has been back there for a long time. Mine is going to be a little bit more of, i was there, and i will tell you some funny things, difficult things, some mysteries. Very helileo, a used a very early telescope to provide our first real knowledge of the moon. In fact, till the arrival of spacecraft, other telescopic work did not add much more to that knowledge. Slide, we see the large, smooth, dark areas that seas. O called these areas are pitted with craters, which he called craters. He did name them as craters. The intensely cratered areas, which appear white in contrast to the dark, became known as terra, or highlands. Indeed, they were higher than the darkcolored basins. Many controversies about the moon, as we heard a minute to generations. For extreme positions were taken by gentlemen with great eloquence, but few fact. Now is theotten intense debate on such subjects as the depths to which a spacecraft might think into the sink into the lunar dust, the ability of water to shape the landscape, and whether radiation could be accumulated in the dust from the solar system and cause an explosion when an astronaut put his foot down in the soil. Finally, the presence of exotic organisms or water under the surface. These things seem very passe to us now, we have to remember that such controversies consumed countless hours, millions of dollars to settle, and thousands of printed pages during the development of the apollo. The lunar ranger and lunar andeyor project from jpl the surveyor project at langley some ofen to resolve these and other questions that affected the safety of astronauts for the mission. That apolloall know did not sink out of sight in the it did not it explode on landing. In fact, the apollo 11 safe craft spacecraft, samples, and crew were quarantined for 21 days until testing showed that exotic organisms were not present. Engineers worked for more than a decade to solve the problems of getting to the moon and back. At the same time, scientists were working on problems that would allow them to interpret the lunar samples. ,hey did not know at the time that is what they were doing. Scientists involved in the war effort took their new knowledge and took them back to the universities. A new generation of graduate students began to use these tools to attack problems in geology and other fields. These include some of the ones you probably know about the war. 6 billion euros age of iron meteorites 4. 6 billion year of iron meteorites highlighting the problems of lead in gasoline, and a detailed study of impact craters here on earth. Bornpic geochemistry was in chicago under the leadership of Nobel Prize Winner harold yuri and others. Their students moved to caltech and other universities around the country in the early 1950s and continued these kinds of studies, and were to become critical to understanding the returned lunar samples. The, in the mid60s, Apollo Program wanted scientists to develop clean labs, new interments instruments, and clean protocol and procedures to repair prepare for the return of samples. Hundreds of teams of many countries were chosen to work on the apollo 11 ample. Necessitating the development of new Precision Instruments and labs for the analysis of small samples. A number of these teams were at caltech and jpl, chosen to work with different approaches. I was part of a team at caltech dubbed the lunatic asylum. [laughter] dr. Albee which included a variety of different approaches. During the quarantine period, scientists and technicians in the Lunar Receiving Lab were andng preliminary studies testing samples that had been selected for distribution for various teams. Were under strict security. We had to keep them in a safe, etc. , and there was an embargo on releasing any results until the apollo 11 lunar conference in january 1970 in houston. Each team was required to arrive at the conference, turn in a written paper, give that paper and publish that paper without any changes. This amounted to a real blind test. In addition, there was a fixed word limits. I can remember spending my christmas vacation in part editing and reediting our manuscript to see if we could just take out a few words here or get a few more words in the re, because that was one of the difficulties. The combination of these rules set up a giant blind test of all these new techniques, and everybody headed to houston to see what others have learned and to see if they had gotten it right. But the new rotation came through with flying colors. A decade before, we could not have gotten all the data that we got. We could not have interpreted it because we would not have known what to do with it. Mineralogys of the and mineral chemistry, texture and bulk composition of rocks, i used to determine physical and chemical history. Trace elements chemistry was used to find the signatures of very specific geochemical processes. Tocise analysis is used study a wide variety of chronological and geochemical problems. These samples were also examined for a variety of physical properties, such as magnetism and seismic wave velocity. It is probably obvious that no could operate with all of these techniques and methods. I will tell you about this next slide. We are looking here at the lunar surface, which you have seen. Craters everywhere, fine dust, and here and there, rocks sticking up out of it. Now, our team members, like most of you now and in the past two days, the entire world, actually, had looked over armstrongs shoulder as he zoomed over a battered war zone of craters of all sizes and over a pile of rocks to land on the lunar surface. Here we see that surface and an array of small craters. Standing on the latter, responding to earlier concerns is to earlier concerns and landing,sion armstrong actually commented in the live broadcast that the spacecraft pads had not sunk into the soil. Slide shows that the soil what the soil looks like closeup. Fine soil and larger rock were all you see there fragments broken in the intense cratering that had hurled them to this site. There was nothing that we collected that came from bedrock. They thought they would have to collect from bedrock, but there was no bedrock to collect from. And great anticipation, we examined our soil sample under the microscope and began to start our tour of the moon. This next slide shows a handful of apollo 11 soil. It contains a wide variety of material. It is originally very dusty, you have to blow it off to see these beautiful particles. In part, these are transported from a very great distance by multiple cratering events. This soil provides an answer to the very first question i asked what is the moon made of . Harvard studied nearly 2000 of these little fragments to see exactly what they were under the microscope. About a third of the fragments were of dark rock derived from the mare. They were identified as the salt, the most common volcanic rock on earth. It did not take any special equipment, just an experienced eye and hand lens, to be able to make that determination. Was a massivethem broken rock fragments cemented by glass, which had formed as a melt during the impact. Here , the light ones i hope i can find the right 1 these light ones are , knownaluminum silicate as andesite. The team looked at these and took a giant leap. They inferred that these had been transported from the highlands. The highlands were far away and it would take multiple impact to bring that material. Nevertheless, the material was abundant. They took an even greater giant leap and inferred that an early calcium aluminum silicate, with ridgecrest, was reduced by floating of these crystals, they crystallize from the melt. So they floated to the top towards the surface. Ocean of of an early molten rock became dubbed the [inaudible] but maybe even with considerable doubt. We expected to see your regular glass globs, but the presence of all of these beautiful spheres was a great surprise, though it should probably not have been. It does not slice through not the atmosphere, you have to be careful here. If its life groups face if it slides through space, it tends to become spherical. The next slides were very intriguing. We spent lots of time playing with the balls. Round balls, green balls, red balls, hollow balls. Here is half of all. It has been broken. On this fresh surface, we seeees white dots we these white dots through this area here. Each of those is an impact crater from a micro meteorite. One of these i will show you in the next life. Here we see where the impact of the micro meteorite was, it has a molten shell around it, then outflows of what is now glass, which is the melt, and beads going out further and further in all directions. If you look deeper in it, there are fractures in it. These cops like this sometimes broke loose, and these cups like this sometimes broke loose, and we found them floating in the soil. One of my favorite photos of a cup like this is actually one that hit another meteorite. It is a micro meteorite hitting an iron meteorite and arming one of those full forming one of those beautiful cups. The bottom side shows the bombardment of the atoms here the atmosphere. Unlike earth, partly protected by its Magnetic Field and atlas here atmosphere, this sampled in the rocks and preserved a record of meteorites, of cosmic rays and solar wind and flares. The energy of the solar flares differs between the wind and the flares, so these particles come in and are deposited at different depths. Flares tend to be deposited deeper in the rock and the wind higher up. The cosmic rays have an interaction with the material in the rock and produce new elements which can be analyzed. These things can be used to look making has been different depths in soils and rocks. You can understand what the radiation effects have been for many, many a time. One of the interesting things in apollo data shows the average solar flare activity has not changed much over the past few million years, and there were thattheories up until then solar flares were responsible for climate change. But there has not been kind of a specific change. Questions, list of because this is the main reason our particular group was chosen, was to investigate the dark mare rocks. We received portions to study and to date. Upon the first site in the lab, it was clear they looked quite different. The volcanic different from volcanics through much of the world. We asked a question that we asked for a million years, what is the moon made of . The next slide shows photos of a thin slice of a rock, one of the the marerocks, one of rocks, showing reflected and refracted light. To identifyus Different Minerals in the rocks for comparison for the saul centers, and in particular to see where the last bits of the melt crystallized was a composition. It turns out that the features that you see are a little different. It could perfectly well have been collected from a frozen flow in hawaii. However, when we look at the late stage crystallization, we see distinctive differences always endsbasalt up with some water bearing minerals, these little clay minerals. Are not present in the lunar rocks. There is no trace of water. They are perfectly clean and not altered. The other thing, that little white thing with refracted reflected light is a globule of and the question sometimes i ask is, can you tell a lunar basalt from a terrestrial basalt . At first glance, they look alike. Indeed, from details you can understand the differences. This next slide is a little bit complicated. A what we call evolution diagram. We received five samples of the rocks, portions of them. We dated them, each with ages close to 3. 6 5 million years. Of theioactive decay strontium 87 isotope with a known halflife is the basis for the dating. This diagram shows a plot of against rubidium 8786, because that is a convenient way to determine them with a mass spectrometer. They were measured in a number of different samples taken from b, c,rocks now, for a, which have different compositions along this line. If they make a linear line, like that itere, we see originally formed along this line and had decayed for the same amount of time back to that line. Internal isaac runs, and it is used to measure the rubidium stretch. The bulk of the ages from the lunar samples are rubidium measurements. Because of the embargo, we could not talk about this exciting date until a conference, and we learned the other groups had gotten similar results with this and other isotopic techniques. These results provided an the widespreadr rocks in the sea of tranquility, and later missions dated different rocks from different basins. A cartoon, if is you will, which summarized the history of the events that have shaped the lunar history. Down at theook lower part, the oldest part of it, what we see their is what we see there is it is heavily cratered. Can fall without obliterating a previous crater. It is saturated with craters during the first half billion years. In it, you can see a group of basins. Lunar orbiterthe data in particular, that topography enables us, the. Eologists, to map these basins from these basins, to see with lookstflow of ejector like. And the various mare layers are shown here, and each of those had been mapped by the photo geological techniques. Basically, you can look at the overlap relations. If it is younger, it laps over older rocks. You can project this through to get a relative time sequence. This sequence we see in the right hand side we see on the right hand side, it shows a whole set of features identified by photo geology. They provided a relative timing, relative sequence of what had happened on the surface of the moon. On the righthand side, you will see that we have dated these various lavas. These then allow us to make an absolute \ this timescale is still used today. It is applied to earth, mars, and other objects in the solar system for which we can come up with a relative sequence of events that we do not have samples yet in order to actually measure the age. We will come back to this but we will see that almost everything in the mode happened in the first 1. 5 billion years. Since then, very very little has happened. The next i want to talk about is the mystery of the europium anomaly. Partial valley whether it is the earth or the moon that is how the salt form. The major element composition of the rocks didnt differ greatly from salts. People who worked using the elements the whole set of rarest elements which at very much alike in most cases because they are very similar in their size and other charges area did the people use these to understand the difference between the salts which are derived from the ocean crust and the salts which are derived from the consonants. As you can see there are distinct differences in the way the where earth where earth patterns are from those two sources. When we look at the lunar once, they show a very different one of a striking anomaly of the element europium. The interesting thing is that meansum which actually the source down there had to then get he pleaded somehow. This had to be formed and that europium had to go somewhere. What we realized from terrestrial examples was that collects europium deferentially over any of the other minerals. It could subtract it. This team, seeing this and they inferred that these crystals had formed. They subtracted the europium, therefore away, and they made the interpretation that there was an early crust accumulationas an of calcium. Do you remember back to almost the start of the talk, a group working in the east had it looked at the particles in the soil and where they came from of interpreted the origin the accumulation of this same mineral. One group using geologic approaches of particles in the soil came up with the same answer as the group using isotopic chemical approaches. Everything was constrained until we get to the conference so it was interesting to hear this coming from two very very different directions. Were Research Groups that hardly ever talk to each other. [laughter] we learned a lot more about this by samples from later missions. It seems to be related to the presence of other unusual rock types. Were going to see a photo of a couple of unusual rock types. The first one is a photograph of a true in our fight. This is aamples sample of the outermost crust high in europium. Shows an alumnus from caltech on apollo 17 collecting a done night sample. There is address there. He knocked that often brought it back. It shows it in the next picture. In this case it has been highly fractured and cut up. This is the actual rock. Done night is not uncommon on earth. We find it in hawaii and in our own desert. Another one is through our rocks, we look at the next slide. This is a complete puzzle. For papers on it and i still dont know what its about. [laughter] i should write another one. This is a rock very rich in potassium. Also phosphorus. It is like granite on earth but we dont know how it fits in. Each of the samples which i have pictured we have dated. Ofeach of them has dates around 4. 4 billion years. They are telling us something about the very early evolution of the moon but we dont know exactly what. I just used a few intriguing detective stories and each one of the hundreds of scientists involved has their own favorites area let me close with a summary of what i think we learned from the Apollo Missions from a scientific sense. Lunar rock studies that provided the cornerstone for the from lunarfindings exploration by spacecraft. Studies are ongoing but newer methods have not yet been studied. Wouldy have heard that we release the once held in reserve and then they would be available for study. We have kept splits of everything we worked on and those are still available. These findings have completely changed our understanding of the moon and its evolution as well as that of earth and the other planets. That the lunarnd surface features are predominantly the result of impact by numerous huge projectiles during the first half billion years of her history. Most of the younger and smaller craters were also formed by by volcanism. The role of volcanism was restricted to filling the basins which resulted from much earlier impacts. By slowdid not form aggregation of cold particles as as one of theup prime theories states. Instead it was covered in its early life and molten rock from which a calcium silicate rich crust formed by floating. Floating in the crystallized of the mineral. As the outer part of the men became rigid, the source of volcanic lava migrated downward in depth to below 500 kilometers. Ago, 3 billion years volcanic activity has been very infrequent and localized. One of the most important things which we are still struggling with, many geochemical similarities show that moon and earth must have formed in the same general region of the solar system. With a relationship not yet understood. They are fundamentally different than your other moons. All of this knowledge is a gift of apollo. Thank you. Thank apollo. [applause] thank you. We are going to bring our chairs on here. We will make a transition now to a discussion portion of our show. Barton is while we get some chairs on stage here. We willoff the evening, transition to a discussion on the apollo era and the legacy of apollo. I would like to welcome back our guests. They are joined by one of the gpl greats. Jpl greats. Onis career, he served development roles. Including leading the design team for the ranger spacecraft. Positionsnior project and many of the missions to mars and venus and was project spacer for three Minor Missions called galileo, cassini, and voyager. [laughter] the jpl chief as engineer from net to 94 to 1999. [applause] i just have to say again what an honor is to be with both of you. It is a privilege. Im going to ask a few questions to get us going then im sure you have questions. So many of you standing and we are appreciative of you being here and want to make sure you get a chance to ask questions. Where going to give you a few minutes here because we have not heard from you. Since you were in charge of the design of the ranger, what were you doing wrong . [laughter] what was your main problem . You had a hard time getting these liberal caltech people to pay any attention. [laughter] i solved that by taking them out for a beer. [laughter] we had never done anything like this before. The jpl at that time had been involved in designing guided missiles for the army and stuff like that and they were a bunch of good people but they were getting older like me. They didnt want any part of designing something that new. They knew with the principles were. They knew the things that had to be done or the way you had to go about doing something complicated to make it successful, interfaces and making deals and having a way of tracking whether your progress against them. Everybody had a product and somebodys product was somebody elses input. Managing the whole concept of deliverables, receivables, schedule, documenting what they needed to do. Thats what they taught us. Iter than that, the rest of figuring out the nuts and bolts was pretty much up to us. Nobody could help us. They were smart enough to do it and let us go. For the most, we were smart enough to pay attention. There was nobody that we could go and ask what about this or what about that because that was stuff that nobody had ever done before. Rangers just to be clear about this, the rangers had some of those failed just because the rockets were working. The mission consists of two parts. A launch vehicle to get whatever you are launching off and going and the thing that you are building, the spacecraft on top of it. The launch vehicle guys were having problems and the spacecraft people were having problems. Ranger one and two worked perfectly. Counted as awere failure because the launch vehicle had to watch it up, put it into orbit than halfway around the earth, launch vehicle had to ignite a second time and accelerate us out of earths orbit. At the first time we did that, it didnt work. Somebody said theres a relay that didnt work and its a random failure itll never happen again. [laughter] so we didnt ranger to end exactly the same thing happened again. [laughter] those counted as to ranger failures but it was the launch vehicle that failed. Ranger three and four were most spacecraft failures and one was another rocket failure. It was going back and forth but who is our community . Scientiststy is the and the engineers that were working on this but also there is the political community. Were fundingns who mess and the congress and the newspaper, they dont give a rats tutti. The mission didnt work. We had a lot of failures one after another. What did that due to morale . What was it like here . It was sort of disappointing. [laughter] he answered that question you did that interview. You liked what he answered . I dont knowid was if you picked it up but somebody said wasnt it the moralizing all of these failures and he said no it wasnt. He said what he did was it made us more unified and more committed to find the problem and everybody pitched in. Thats where we learned it was you cant just do your own job with this. You have to be looking over your shoulder and watching what the people next to you are doing because what if they dont do it right, the mission isnt going to work and youre all toast. We wanted everybody to work well. We tried to help out in whatever way we could. I think that was good. The funny thing about engineers, they like to solve problems. The heard the problem, the better they like it area one of the problems we had was you give an engineer a problem to work on and if he doesnt find it hard enough, he will find a way to complex affiant. [laughter] tomake it something more fun work on. That was the other problem. Of their polishing the cannonball and we used to iselop a saying that better the enemy of good. It has to be good enough and knowing when to stop improving things is just as important as knowing when to begin. [laughter] even i fired a few manages to keep the politicians happy. Thats the other thing also. We dont fire a lot of people are making mistakes. Sometimes a person has made a mistake. Having made that mistake makes them more valuable in the next assignment because they have learned something. You have made an investment in that person area a milliondollar investment. [laughter] john, i have been waiting all my to ask you this question. Russians earlye on sent up dogs into space. Among read that you were thinking aboutl sending dogs to the moon. Tell us that story. Of the initial task force of tried to figure out how to put astronauts on the moon. People whonch of worked under a guy named charlie and they went back to washington and they helped do the architecture of this program. There were some of us who said thats crazy. Why put people on the moon theres no air of their. They have to put them in a space suit and get them back. Someone said why dont we train some dogs . Do can train dogs to remarkable things. You can teach them what they need to do. Use a hammer or Something Like that. [laughter] put them in a little space suit and put them up to the moon and when theyre done they will die but you dont have to worry about bringing them back. Youre a dog hater. [laughter] no im not a dog hater. Im neutral about dogs. [laughter] dogs have an affinity for me. So do goats. Goats and dogs love me. [laughter] ill tell you the goat story sometime. [laughter] we went nowhere very fast. You about the origins. Can you speak about what some of the thoughts are that scientists have about how our moon came to be . We know because of the geochemical similarities that earth and beyond earth and moon are closely related. They were formed from the same batch of meteorites. What we dont know is exactly how whether they collided, changed matter, these sorts of things. The basic theory that is now operating and which people are working on great details of the details of the collision process and everything is that there was a collision between two major asteroids. One of which became earth. Many oflision combined the materials so that we know. Exactly the details we dont. Every issue there is a slightly new different touch. Goes it was 4. 5 billion years ago the art was born. Both were formed at the same time. The key thing really that makes them come together for the oxygen isotopes. They are so similar to each other and so different from other meteorites. It is a unique circumstance. The same genetic or geologic code. Can you talk about when you mentioned the molten sea, the ocean, did it cover the entire orbit . Highlands are the frozen magma. They cover everywhere around the moon. Yes, it is how the moon cooled and crystallized. I will like to throw it open to some questions from the audience. Upanyone would like to come to the microphone. We have a microphone over here. Just come over to the microphone. I was like to ask if there were any differences between the different ranger probes from number one to number six . The rangers . One through six . We developed the rangers sort of like i compare it to a volkswagen. They all look the same on the outside. If you buy one one year than you buy another 13 years from now it looks the same but they have made improvements under the hood area a series of gradual ranger one andea ranger to the ranger spacecraft had to be stabilized. When we did ranger one, we only control the pitch and yacht we did not worry about role. Outside we had an antenna that had to point to the earth. Thats another way to position the antenna is getting the pitch right but also the role. For ranger one and ranger to we didnt control the role. We didnt have any propulsion on it. Then number three number four and number five week appointed antenna then we added propulsion. Each one of those rangers had a built on twoat was from the previous one. Projectreminds me that manager who told me a story that what was thrown at the project early on they had not fully into the painted was contamination. Requirement that we sterilize the spacecraft. That meant baking them. Electronics tor the point where you didnt realize you were going to have to take your electronics. That was not part of the original design requirement. I was running the ranger one and ranger to program and we had a bigger battery in the middle of it area they said you have to sterilize this battery and i said wait a second. They were designed to be sterilized. We talked to some people and that if you heated up to 125 degrees centigrade for three or four hours that should kill anything thats in there. [laughter] it turns out a killed the battery but we didnt know it at the time. A few weeks later, after a weekend, we ended up with a spacecraft with a battery in the building and we were testing it at the time. The battery exploded and it blew electrolyte all over the spacecraft and everything else. We said holy macro, thats not a good idea. [laughter] we didnt know for sure but we were pretty sure it was the heat sterilization because people dont usually do that to batteries. [laughter] after that, we put a temperature on it and a new battery in and cleaned it up and we watched the temperature continually. And ia call one night dont think it was thanksgiving but it was thanksgiving weekend and they said the temperature is going up what are you going to do about it . Said call of a technician. At him meet me in there. It was in a little test chamber outside of building 18. And he said bring your drill motor and a quarter inch drill. He said what do you want me to do . I went to drill a hole in the top of the battery and he said what are you going to do and i said im going to stand back here. But it worked fine. Earlier this evening we saw a footprint on the moon. You wouldnt be seeing the footprint if the footpad it wasnt in it. Did the surveyor bounce . Is that why we are seeing the footprint . My understanding on the surveyor three because i listened to the audio of the transcript of what they were seeing through that time is that it landed with a bit of an incline. It slid just a little bit. Thank you for a great talk. I was wondering if you could and us about the history mineralogy of the lunar sample in the museum area. I dont even know which one is in their. To theere distributed various centers and i dont think i have looked at the one that is in there now. What number is on it . I might know it by that. [laughter] i will look at it afterwards. Where going to make sure we get a couple of media questions. One person wants to know what did you think when you first held a piece of the moon . What was that like . I try to convey that. Sampleu look at the soil , the glass balls are crazy. He didnt expect them to be there but you do and theyre everywhere. One more question from social media. Bestdo you think are the ways to expose new generations to the legacy of apollo . The vast amount of information and what we have learned and the legacy . That sounds like a question for a professor. [laughter] theres a certain thing called the apollo affect. Mission first of all we are spending so much money on the program. If there werent enough engineers or technologists involved in the country to do all the work that needed to be done. It was an exciting idea sending man to the moon and it attracted a lot of young people that would have otherwise wasted their College Careers being doctors or lawyers area. [laughter] to go into science and technology. That is what made the whole Space Program eventually possible. All of the things happened because of that influx. Other countries jumped on the wagon also. China and india and everything else. They know about the apollo affect. That is why theyre in it now. The thing to get people in his to make sure the wit missions we do are not just Science Missions which is good and are not Just Technology missions which are good but are publicly engaging. They are missions that captured the imagination of people and get them interested in it. What the hell do i know . [laughter] thank you. Next question. Era ofe enter a new spaceflight, what are the most important lessons to remember from your era of Space Exploration . What are the important lessons from your era of space experience for the next generation and the next era of space . There is a continual transition. Apollo basically had no computers. Now, a spacecraft is filled with computers. The whole arrangement is different. When we flew mars surveyor we had a network on board connecting all of the instruments to the spacecraft and the parts of the spacecraft. It basically was like a wifi network. So thats transition happened between apollo and the next few missions the jpl began doing. What about you john . What would you say to the next generation . There are so many dimensions. Ityou talk about what does take to terms of engineering and development to make something successful or have you coach people to do things so that they will last a long while . We learned that very slowly and painfully over a long time. It used to be the main problem was twofold. The first one was electronic thingsrea most of the you had vacuum tubes and you couldnt depend on them to last more than three or four years enoughne of you are old to remember Television Sets with vacuum tubes area you have to call the tv repair man and he would come with his bag of vacuum tubes and put a new one in. Or when you plug the vacuum cleaner in you have to remember to plug the tv back in. Then things would fail. Innsistors were invented 1954. I was still in college and i was learning about vacuum tubes and they brought these transistors in. People didnt believe they could do anything. If you sell a billion cell phones, you put an incredible amount of technology into these new techniques. Micro spacecraft directly to cell phones. In the development program, something always goes wrong. Anything that goes wrong, you have to swallow that to the root cause. To theown and find out degree that you can what happened and do what you can or what you need to do to prevent that thing from happening again. That is the key. You have to have the discipline and a much you have the discipline and instill it in the young people, the need to do that, they just want to fix it and go on but fixing it and going on doesnt mean you have to it doesnt mean it wont happen again. You have to fix the thing that caused it to go wrong then youre on a good track. That takes discipline and a lot of tedious work. Its not fun always. That is what you go out and have a beer at the end of the day. [laughter] that, two things looking from my perspective what i see engineers working on is miniaturization is key and the second is the complexity of the software. These days, software is whats going to get you before the hardware. We have time for just a couple more questions area. The brilliant idea of setting off a nuclear bomb on the motion is brilliant to me. Who talked mcnamara down . It wasnt mcnamara. It was someone in the Department Working on that. Our Defense Department is always working on i crazy ideas. Some of them end up being technologically interesting and good ideas. This was just one of them. What about space debris . Did they know about it . Yes. Of t would do in terms i dont know if they were particularly worried about. Last question. Which ofd like to know the seven ranger probes cost the most raced on the parts used to build them. How much was the most expensive ranger to build. This is a budget guide here. We have an accountant on our hands. [laughter] i dont know if we could and identify the cost of each ranger because they were built as a program. Soh one has more capability number three number four and number five cost more than number one and two. Because there were so many failures, then we had to learn about those failures and more work and more people more time more testing. Each one of them i would say what cost more than the one before. The most expensive one would have been the last one which is ranger 10. That is about all we have for tonight. I would like to thank everyone here and for joining us online area thank you for our speakers. [applause] month for ournext show on dwarf planets. It is a big science of a small world. Good night. [applause] this weekend on American History tv. Tonight at 8 00 eastern on comparisonshistory, between Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson on the constitution. You look at the whole cartoon. It is a very different impression of what people thought of johnson and the constitution of the time. It was about his ability and that he was acting in unconstitutional ways. Sunday at 6 00 on american artifacts, a preview of the national archives. Women who were americas first voters and 1776 when new jersey became a state, the new jersey state constitution made no mention of sex when discussing voting qualifications. It only had property requirement. Women who owned enough property primarily windows and single women could and did vote in state,ns at the local, and national level. At 8 00 p. M. On the presidency, we talk about nixons early life and career. In 1948, he campaigned for the Marshall Plan area he went to every rotary club, chamber of commerce, vfw and american legion. He owed them his best judgment not his obedience. And he convinced them. When the Party Primaries were held in california in 1948, Richard Nixon did not just win the republican nomination he won the democratic nomination. He won unopposed. Traveling the country to explore the american story, the cspan cities tour has visited 24 cities in the last 12 months. Next, one of the highlights from our stop in independence, missouri. Exhibition about harry truman in world war i. Harry truman was the only presiden s