Apollo astronaut autobiographies

[bknight]

I think the scientist in question was Thomas Gold of Cornell. He had a lot of, uh, "unconventional" views in those days.

I had to look him up as I didn't know of him.  Some correct and some incorrect assumptions of Lunar regolith.

BUT his beliefs of how/where petroleum is formed is way too bizarre and totally against current theories of petroleum from anorexic bacteria on the oceans floor, burial and undergoing transformation with heat and pressure into petroleum products.

[Dalhousie]

I'm reading Frank Borman's "Countdown" right now. He mentions how they checked the dosage readings after passing through the VAB's. Well within expectations and then he mentions about how a lot of scientists thought they would get fried by the radiation. What? Which scientists is he referring to? Surely they had this all figured out so why would scientists think that? I know one scientist was still insistent about there being very deep dust despite the Surveyor landings but that was one guy. Borman makes it sound like quite a number of scientists were worried about the VAB radiation.

That was good old Thomas Gold - never let data stand in the way of a good story.

Not just the Surveyor landings either, Luna 9 and 13 and Rangers 7, 8 and 9 all returned data inconsistent with Gold's theories.

[Dalhousie]

I think the scientist in question was Thomas Gold of Cornell. He had a lot of, uh, "unconventional" views in those days.

Ok. Thanks. Looks like his original prediction of the regolith depth was modified prior to the Surveyor program and he came up with a pretty accurate model. I guess his style was grating to some people thus the animosity towards him:

From wiki:

"From the 1950s, Gold served as a consultant to NASA and held positions on several national space committees, including the President's Science Advisory Committee, as the United States tried to develop its space program. At the time, scientists were engaged in a heated debate over the physical properties of the moon's surface. In 1955, he predicted that the Moon was covered by a layer of fine rock powder stemming from "the ceaseless bombardment of its surface by Solar System debris".[22] This led to the dust being jokingly referred to as "Gold's dust".[30] Gold initially suggested that astronauts would sink into the dust, but upon later analysis of impact craters and electrostatic fields, he determined that the astronauts' boots would sink only three centimeters into the Moon's surface. In any case, NASA sent unmanned Surveyors to analyze the conditions on the surface of the Moon. Gold was ridiculed by fellow scientists, not only for his hypothesis, but for the approach he took in communicating NASA's concerns to the American public; in particular, some experts were infuriated with his usage of the term "moon dust" in reference to lunar regolith.[31] When the Apollo 11 crew landed on the Moon in 1969 and brought back the first samples of lunar rocks, researchers found that lunar soil was in fact powdery. Gold said the findings were consistent with his hypothesis, noting that "in one area as they walked along, they sank in between five and eight inches". However, Gold received little credit for his correct prediction, and was even criticized for his original prediction of a deep layer of lunar dust.[22] Gold had also contributed to the Apollo program by designing the Apollo Lunar Surface Closeup Camera (ALSCC) (a kind of stereo camera) used on the Apollo 11, 12, and 14 missions.[22][32]"

According to Baldwin,  Gold was adhering to his view even after the landings.  He also retconned his views, trying to claim that minor local sinkage proved him right - it didn't.

[smartcooky]

IMO, Gold was thinking along the lines of a similar scenario to that outlined by Arthur C. Clarke in his SciFi novel "A Fall of Moondust" . I doubt there is anyone here who hasn't either read the story or at least knows what its about, but for those who haven't, a brief summery...

The Sea of Thirst, (located within the Sinus Roris) is filled with an extremely fine dust, a fine powder far drier than the contents of a terrestrial desert and which almost flows like water, instead of the common regolith which covers most of the lunar surface. A specially designed "Dust Cruiser" named the Selene skims over the surface of the dust in the same manner as a jetski.

But on one cruise, a moonquake causes an underground cavern to collapse, upsetting the equilibrium. As the Selene passes over, it sinks about 15 metres below the surface of the dust, hiding the vessel from view, and trapping it beneath the dust.

Now that we know the nature of lunar "dust" we know that this scenario is nigh on impossible. Rather than being dust in the sense that we are used to here on Earth, lunar dust is made up of sharp-edged, highly abrasive particles. This is due to the lack of erosion on the lunar surface. It is extremely unlikely that anything would sink into it like that. IIRC, the astronauts had considerable difficulty in driving the flagpoles into it.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/experiments/smi/

"When astronauts inserted sampling tubes into the soil, they typically found penetration was easy for the first 10 to 20 centimeters and increasingly difficult below that depth. The deepest penetration achieved on a hand-driven core tube was 70 centimeters, which required about 50 blows with a hammer."

[mako88sb]

IMO, Gold was thinking along the lines of a similar scenario to that outlined by Arthur C. Clarke in his SciFi novel "A Fall of Moondust" .

That's funny. I was actually thinking about that book a couple days ago for the first time in quite awhile. I read it in my teens so getting close to 45 years ago. 

[ka9q]

I got my undergraduate degree from Cornell in 1978, but as far as I can remember I only heard Gold speak once, in Baltimore (my home town) while I was still in high school. I remember thinking at the time that his style was rather "unconventional". I think I already knew of his incorrect prediction of a sea of dust on the moon.

I also read somewhere that Gold ruffled some feathers getting his stereo closeup camera onto Apollo 11, when there were powerful voices arguing against carrying any scientific experiments on the very first landing. You'll see it in some of Armstrong's pictures, such as near the rim of Little West Crater during his brief excursion there.

[Zakalwe]

There is reasonability in this estimate, since there were only 5 missions that landed successfully

6

No, five if he's talking about Surveyor missions, which I think he is...

Surveyor 1 – Launched May 30, 1966; landed on Oceanus Procellarum, June 2, 1966
Surveyor 2 – Launched September 20, 1966; crashed near Copernicus crater, September 23, 1966
Surveyor 3 – Launched April 17, 1967; landed on Oceanus Procellarum, April 20, 1967
Surveyor 4 – Launched July 14, 1967; crashed on Sinus Medii, July 17, 1967
Surveyor 5 – Launched September 8, 1967; landed on Mare Tranquillitatis, September 11, 1967
Surveyor 6 – Launched November 7, 1967; landed on Sinus Medii, November 10, 1967
Surveyor 7 – Launched January 7, 1968; landed near Tycho crater, January 10, 1968

I am corrected. My apologies to bknight

[bknight]

I am corrected. My apologies to bknight

Not to worry, I as others have made mistakes here.

[BazBear]

I got my undergraduate degree from Cornell in 1978, but as far as I can remember I only heard Gold speak once, in Baltimore (my home town) while I was still in high school. I remember thinking at the time that his style was rather "unconventional". I think I already knew of his incorrect prediction of a sea of dust on the moon.

I also read somewhere that Gold ruffled some feathers getting his stereo closeup camera onto Apollo 11, when there were powerful voices arguing against carrying any scientific experiments on the very first landing. You'll see it in some of Armstrong's pictures, such as near the rim of Little West Crater during his brief excursion there.

Odd looking critter!

I had no idea A11 used this contraption; and I'm surprised those powerful naysayers didn't win that battle (for A11 at least).

[bknight]

Was it used?  I don't remember an image with either of them using something like that.  I'll have to admit I haven't rechecked the image catalog.

[ka9q]

Yes, the photos returned from the Gold camera on Apollo 11 were on Magazine 45:

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/images11.html#Mag45

[gwiz]

When the Apollo 11 exhibition came to London, part of it was a stereo viewer system set up so you could look at the soil close-ups for yourself.

[Dalhousie]

I got my undergraduate degree from Cornell in 1978, but as far as I can remember I only heard Gold speak once, in Baltimore (my home town) while I was still in high school. I remember thinking at the time that his style was rather "unconventional". I think I already knew of his incorrect prediction of a sea of dust on the moon.

I also read somewhere that Gold ruffled some feathers getting his stereo closeup camera onto Apollo 11, when there were powerful voices arguing against carrying any scientific experiments on the very first landing. You'll see it in some of Armstrong's pictures, such as near the rim of Little West Crater during his brief excursion there.

Quite a few scientific experiments were flown, so there were clearly more powerful voices arguing for a science program than those against.  Gold was widely (and rightly) considered a crank by this time on the subject of the Moon, but it was a valid experiment.

[bknight]

...

I also read somewhere that Gold ruffled some feathers getting his stereo closeup camera onto Apollo 11, when there were powerful voices arguing against carrying any scientific experiments on the very first landing. You'll see it in some of Armstrong's pictures, such as near the rim of Little West Crater during his brief excursion there.

My apologies for not reading the whole post and thereby asking a stupid question

[ka9q]

Quite a few scientific experiments were flown, so there were clearly more powerful voices arguing for a science program than those against.

There was a strong view that no experiments should be flown on Apollo 11, but a compromise was ultimately achieved. They would fly just those experiments that had the highest scientific value and wouldn't take too much time to deploy, while most waited for Apollo 12 and later landings. They were the laser retroreflector, the solar wind collector, the passive seismic experiment, the Gold camera and various sample collections.