Photo Finish (Not of This Moon Edition)

 

Earthrise, 1968

 The most influential environmental photograph ever taken.

--Galen Rowell, wilderness photographer

We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing was that we discovered the Earth.

--William Anders

Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders job on Christmas Eve, 1968 was to snap pictures of the lunar surface in preparation for the first manned landing sometime the next year, when he noticed this:

Black-and-white film was cheaper and more commonplace in the 1960s, which is why the first picture of the Earth taken in lunar orbit is monochromatic. However, a few rolls of color film were on board in case of a special occasion. Anders figured this was a special enough occasion and beckoned his fellow astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell:

Anders: Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.  

Borman: (joking) Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled.                                                                    

Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?                            

Lovell: Oh, man, that's great!

And that's how the famous color photo at the top of this post came to be, though Anders, Lowell, and Borman would have seen it from this angle:

 

       

Anders, 90, died yesterday when the plane he was piloting alone plunged into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state.                 

Lovell, Anders, and Borman

Lost in Space

 

The James Webb Space Telescope recently chanced upon something rather interesting, which can be seen in the center of that red-outlined square at the bottom of the above picture. Well, as it is, I guess it's a little too small to be of much interest to anybody, so let's enlarge it a bit:

That's right, it's a cosmic question mark! Boy, we've wasted all these years debating the possibility of extraterrestrial life when we really should have been focused on extraterrestrial punctuation. Scientists theorize it's merely two galaxies colliding with each other, which can result in all kinds of interesting shapes when seen from a very great distance. Andromeda and our own Milky Way galaxy are set on a collision course some four billion years from now, so who knows, we may end up an exclamation point or even a semicolon. An ampersand would be cool. With our luck it will probably be an asterisk, just another footnote in interstellar history.

As you might expect, there are those who don't buy it as an astronomical optical illusion at all, but instead see it as evidence of a Supreme Being. If so, then I find the prospect profoundly disturbing. After all, we're the one that are supposed to be asking the questions, not God!

First Strike

 

Ever since somebody figured out that an asteroid crash landing on what is today Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula some 66 million years ago caused all the dinosaurs to go extinct, there's been fears that the same thing could happen again. Except this time around the extinct species won't be the dinosaurs but we humans! So the best minds at NASA came up with a homo sapiens-saving solution: shoot a spacecraft at an incoming celestial rock and knock it out of its trajectory. And that's what this past Monday's Double Asteroid Redirection Test was all about. Launched in November 2021, the DART space vehicle was only the size of a vending machine when it was sent hurtling into Dimorphos  (which posed no threat to Earth), an asteroid the size of football field, but at a speed of 14,000 miles per hour, it can cause quite a bang for its $320 million price tag:

The lack of a Star Wars-like explosion may make the whole thing seem anticlimactic, but that's only because the spacecraft's camera was destroyed upon impact, giving proof that there was indeed an impact, and the reason for all the cheering and high-fiving among the NASA ground crew.

Here's the pictures the Webb and Hubble telescopes took:

In addition to being an asteroid, Dimorphos is also a moon that orbits a bigger asteroid--one about a half-mile wide--named Didymos which does get too close to Earth on occasion. If the smaller asteroid's orbit is altered in any way, we'll know the mission was a success. That may still be a couple months away, but scientists are optimistic, and if that optimism is borne out, you'll be able to look up at a shooting star in the nighttime sky secure in the knowledge that it need not be an extinction-level event.

Unfortunately...

...other threats will still be there.

Quips and Quotations (Flying Solo Edition)

 

1930-2021

I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have...This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.

-- Michael Collins, who stayed behind on the command module Columbia as fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon in the lunar lander Eagle. Orbiting the moon all by himself 14 times, Collins was cut off from all communications with Earth for about 45 minutes every time the Columbia entered the natural satellite's renowned dark side. Even when Collins was back in contact with Earth, he was not among the estimated 600 million television viewers who got to see Armstrong and Aldrin traipse about the Sea of Tranquility. Still, he was there to pick the two men up when the Eagle bid adieu to the moon, all three returning safely to Earth. Deke Slayton, at the time the director of Flight Crew Operations, offered to put Collins back into crew rotation afterwards, which probably would have allowed him to walk on the moon himself on the final lunar mission in 1972. But having already been in space twice--he also had been a member of Gemini 10, where he had performed a spacewalk--Collins didn't want yet another long absence from his family that training for such a mission demanded, and so resigned from NASA. In his post-astronaut life, Collins wrote a best-selling autobiography, worked as an assistant secretary for the State Department, was the first director of the National Air and Space Museum, was made a vice-president of an aerospace company, and opened his own consulting firm. Aside from all that, he basically kept out of the spotlight, as he considered  celebrityhood rather silly. Nevertheless, he had his own Twitter account, and, a little more than a week ago, left this tweet:

 

 

 

 
 

 

  

This Day in History

In 1961, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel in space. Note I didn't day first human; that honor went to Yuri Gagarin (damn Rooskie!) Unlike Gagarin, Shepard did get to manually control his craft, so that was kind of another first. And his feat did give Americans hope that this space program might be worth spending money on, President Kennedy using the occasion to push for a manned trip to the moon. Shepard's achievement was overshadowed about a year later when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, rather than merely go up and down as Shepard did. Nevertheless, Shepard assumed he'd be in space, and was in fact scheduled to be the lead astronaut in the upcoming Gemini program (in which a capsule carried two astronauts rather than one.) Unfortunately, his health gave out. He began experiencing dizzy spells and nausea, which he thought at first he might keep to himself. Why let NASA worry about something like that? But then it occurred to him that dizzy spells and nausea in outer space could be fatal, and he 'fessed up to his superiors. A doctor checked him out, and found he had Menier's disease, in which fluid builds up in the inner ear. Shepard was grounded. In the meantime, the Space Program went on. Gemini soon gave way to Apollo. A horrible accident left three astronauts dead in an initial launch pad accident, but, despite that tragedy, two men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren, eventually walked on the moon in what became a worldwide media event (though I'm not sure the Russians watched it; they may have had their sets tuned to the Bolshoi Ballet instead.) Shepard may have seemed like an astrohas-been at that point. 

Medical science to the rescue! By 1969, a doctor had come up with a surgical cure for Menier's disease. Shepard checked into a hospital under an assumed name, had a hole or something drilled in his ear, and the dizziness was no more. He was back on active duty. But how soon could he go to the moon?

Alan Shepard was a character. It's said that I Dream of Jeannie producer Sidney Sheldon based  Roger Healey (played by Bill Daily) after him. But Shepard didn't some sitcom scribe to come up with lines for him.  When an unmanned rocket that was supposed to be the prototype of one that would take him and other members of the Mercury 7 into the cosmos blew up in the sky during a test run, Shepard turned to a stunned John Glenn and said, "Well, I'm glad they got that one out of the way." After his historic first flight into space, Shepard was asked what he was thinking about when he sat upon the giant rocket waiting to blast off. His reply: "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.^" Funny guy, but there were some things about Shepard that others, particularly Glenn, didn't find so funny. Sidney Sheldon might have. Sheldon eventually put sitcoms behind him and became a best-selling author of racy novels, and Alan Shepard would have fit right in one of those books as he was a notorious party animal and womanizer. In fact, Shepard, who had a wife waiting for him at home, almost lost the first-American-in-space gig to the straight-laced Glenn because NASA officials feared a sex scandal. That scandal never happened, but having this playboy once again represent the space program must have given those officials pause. And then there was the little problem of experience. Shepard, grounded at the time, was not among the 32 astronauts originally tapped for the Apollo program and had spent no time training for it. Yet he was eventually chosen to command what everyone thought would be the fourth manned trip to the moon. I suspect public relations had something to do with it.

The first manned moon landing, Apollo 11, had the rapt attention of the American public. The second manned landing, Apollo 12, the attention was a bit less rapt. Unlike Neil Armstrong's black-and-white walk on the moon, this one was supposed to be broadcast back to Earth in color, but the camera went on the blink after it was accidentally pointed to the sun, and so it became a monochromatic rerun. What would have been the third manned landing, Apollo 13, did indeed have the rapt attention of the American public, but for the wrong reason. An oxygen tank exploded, raising the prospect of the three astronauts dying in space. Fortunately, they didn't, as they skedaddled back to Earth in time but without having visited the moon (at least they got a good Ron Howard movie out of it.) In the meantime, the Nixon Administration and Congress had started thinking about scaling back the expensive space program soon after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldren, and Micheal Collins splashed down in the Pacific. Now, there were plenty of valid scientific reasons to keep returning to the moon, and it's not like NASA could easily (or cheaply) go anywhere else, but how do you convey that to taxpayers? By entertaining them, which was right up inveterate cutup Alan Shepard's alley.

On February 6, 1971, 47 years ago today, Apollo 14 Commander Alan Shepard conducted the following scientific experiment on the moon, to the rapt attention of the American public:

 You might have heard Shepard say the ball went "miles and miles".

Not quite. It was actually about 200 meters, or 219 yards. What looks like a stick right near the golf ball is actually a metal rod that fellow astronaut Ed Mitchell, trying to get in on the fun, threw as a javelin.

Nevertheless, I, for one, am impressed by Alan Shepard's achievement. After all...

...I can't even get the ball to go through the damn windmill!

This Day in History

On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 was launched. The crew consisted of astronauts Eugene Cernan, John Young, and the commander of the mission, Thomas Stafford.

A dry run for the more momentous Apollo 11--the one with Neil Armstrong--launched a few months later, it did all the same things, but minus a lunar landing. OK, that's one helluva minus. Let's see if I can get some addition going here

Stafford, Cernan, and Young were the second crew to orbit the moon. That's the command module above. So who got close enough to photographed it?

Either Cernan or Young, who flew the odd-looking contraption above, the Lunar Module.

The Lunar Module eventually came within 8.4 nautical miles (that's 15.6 km for all my foreign readers out there) of the moon.

Somewhere along the way somebody snapped a picture of an "Earthrise". It wasn't the first such picture, as an earlier (and more iconic) photo was taken on Apollo 8 in December, 1968.

In fact, Apollo 10 seemed destined to be the least iconic of all the 1960s space flights. Second moon orbit, second Earthrise, a lunar lander that never actually landed. Yet it was necessary. So how to make it more interesting, more entertaining, to the taxpaying public footing the bill? NASA turned to a pop culture phenomenon bigger than even the space program itself.

That's the Command Module on the left, the Lunar Module on the right.

Though the two modules were named after Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the comic strip characters were never "official" mascots for Apollo 10. However, if after looking at the above pictures you thought otherwise, you're forgiven.

If you were at a NASA visitors center 45 years later and thought otherwise, you're forgiven.

Let's briefly return to 1969.

As the astronauts walk down a brightly lit hallway, a young NASA secretary holds out a stuffed Snoopy for them to pet.

 

The petting threatened to turn heavy.

I know that one fellow's behavior might seem a bit boorish (or worse), but, remember, it was the 1960s. As Tom Wolfe and others have pointed out, the astronauts of that era tended to be on the horny side. 

Perhaps with some encouragement.