Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing. The rock was far more brittle than he anticipated, and instead of cleaving in two it shattered. One of those shards flew away with so much force that it left behind a bloody gash in this forearm.
Thankfully, Neil’s miscalculation didn’t take place on the Moon, but on a training exercise in Big Bend, Texas. He was learning how to be a geologist, not a fighter pilot or astronaut, and it’s a good thing he had expert guides with him, so that he wouldn’t make such a rookie mistake during an actual mission.
Early on NASA leaders like James Webb, the Administrator during most of the 1960’s, recognized that the Apollo missions had to also be science missions. This was a scientific opportunity unlike any other. The chance to get up close and personal, literally hands-on, with the Moon itself.
But at the time, the idea that the Apollo missions should have a scientific component was not popular at all. NASA was a political tool. It was an administration tasked with a very specific set of purposes: to propel the United States into space, and, after Kennedy’s famous speech, to beat the Russians to the Moon. And while science is a part of making that possible, it’s not the end goal.
So Webb and other leaders faced stiff resistance. The public and political leaders were not interested in spending vast sums of money on…a little science expedition (things haven’t improved much in the decades since). And even many scientists were opposed to it! They were worried that the absolute buckets of money being poured into Apollo would mean that moon science would take resources away from any other kind of science, especially planetary science, which was a field still in its infancy.
But nowadays NASA is seen as a science-first organization, and it was the Apollo missions that enabled that switch. And the science prioritized in the Apollo missions wasn’t planetary science or astronomy or even physics. It was geology.
If you haven’t noticed yet, the Moon is made of a bunch of rocks. I know, I know. I wish it was cheese too, but it’s rocks. Rock outcrops. Rock plains. Rock mountains. Big rocks, little rocks, fat rocks, skinny rocks. All rocks, all the time. The Apollo astronauts were going to spend quite a bit of time on the Lunar surface. And the thinking was…well, if science can’t be a priority, we should at least give them something useful to do while they’re waiting for their ride back up.
Right away geologists like Dr. Bert King answered NASA’s call to become personal astronaut trainers. Well, not training in being an astronaut, but training astronauts to be geologists. Very quickly the geologists found that the astronauts did not much enjoy classroom lectures. These were fighter pilots and risk-takers…they started getting agitated, fidgety, and made their complaints quite plain.
So the geologists switched gears and took them on field trips, squeezing in training sessions whenever time would allow. The first training session took place in the Grand Canyon – Dr. King figured that the awe-inspiring majesty of the canyon would serve as a lure to draw the astronauts into the science of geology. They were moderately successful, with some astronauts becoming absolutely engrossed, and others less so. But the geologists had one thing in their favor. Regardless of their personal interest in geology, the astronauts were a highly competitive bunch, and a belief quickly spread that the better you were at fieldwork, the more likely you would be selected for a landing mission.
This belief was misguided – mission planners couldn’t care less – but the geologist teachers did nothing to dissuade their students from this notion.
After the Grand Canyon, training exercises took place in Big Bend, the Philmont Ranch in New Mexico, and other places in the American southwest. The geologists knew that these places were nothing like the Moon. Most importantly, much of the geology of the southwest is driven by plate tectonics, weathering, and water-driven processes – all of which the Moon lack – but the variety and scale of geological formations allowed the teachers to give a masters-level crash course in field geology to the astronauts in the limited time they had with them.
Those places were also close to local infrastructure, as the nightly beer runs would attest.
In those training sessions the geologists taught the astronauts the ins and outs of fieldwork. What to look for. What certain structures or patterns signified. How to identify areas or objects of interest. How and when to collect samples. How to take proper measurements and what tools to use. How to describe verbally what they were seeing. How to compose a photograph that served scientific, not touristic, purposes.
Each of the Apollo missions carried a package of scientific instruments, called appropriately enough the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package. Except for Apollo 11, because the full package wasn’t ready yet (science wasn’t the priority, remember), so they had the EARLY Apollo Scientific Experiments Package. And this package was everything you could ever need in a field expedition: a passive seismometer, a magnetometer, a solar wind detector, an ion detector, a heat flow detector, and an active seismic experiment.
Plus all the usual low-tech geology gear. Hammers. Picks. Pokey sticks. Tongs. Scoops. Tubes. Drills. Reacher grabber things. Gnomons. Rakes. Trenchers. Wire brushes. Lenses. Scales. Bags. Containers. Buckets. And don’t forget the toolboxes to carry it all.
Plus their most important tools of all: their own eyes and hands. The astronauts, with all that geology training, could see things that mission control couldn’t. They could walk over and grab stuff. They could investigate it and decide if it was worth keeping. They could do active field research on our first encounter with an alien world.
By the time of Apollo 17, a literal geologist, Harrison Schmitt, went to the moon. And although there was technically a mission plan, he was basically calling the shots himself.
And what they learned would transform everything we knew about the Moon.
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