Mar 19 1976
From The Space Library
Dr. George M. Low, Deputy Administrator of NASA, announced that he would leave government service at the end of June to become president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he received his bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering in 1948 and master's in 1950. He had been a trustee of the institute since 1971. In 1949 Low became an aeronautical research scientist at NACA's Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland. When NASA was formed 9 yr later, he came to Hq, as Chief of Manned Space Flight and was chairman of the committee that planned the Apollo lunar landing program. He became Deputy Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight before transferring to the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston in Feb. 1964 as Deputy Director. In April 1967 after the Apollo 204 fire, Low became manager of the Apollo spacecraft program; under his leadership, the spacecraft was redesigned, manned space missions resumed 23 mo later, and Apollo 11 made the first manned lunar landing in July 1969. Appointed Deputy Administrator of NASA by the President in Dec. 1969, Low negotiated the agreements with the USSR that led to the Apollo-Soyuz flight and other cooperative space projects. (NASA Release 76-54; Admr's letter, 19 Mar 76; NYT, 20 Mar 76, 17; Marshall Star, 24 Mar 76, 1)
A press briefing following the 7th Lunar Science Conference at Johnson Space Center [see 22 Feb.] featured the cochairmen, Dr. Larry Haskins, chief of planetary and earth sciences at JSC, and Dr. Robert Pepin, director of the Lunar Science Institute, and Dr. Peter Hayman of Rice Univ. Dr. Haskins said the conference aimed at broadening the planetary view of people working with lunar samples and data; a substantial interest was developing in the lunar polar-orbiter mission among people more interested than before in planetology, and aware that orbiting and remote-sensing missions would be the principal source for studying geoscientific evolution of these bodies. As an example, long-range operation of the lunar-surface packages had produced information that resulted in a lowered value for lunar heatflow; this in turn "constrained" the composition of the moon and its evolutionary history-"Whatever history it has, the amount of heat in the interior has to match the present heat loss from the body." Also, said Dr. Haskins, lunar data were being used widely by scientists not previously concerned with lunar research: for example, archived data would be used to tell whether the moon was differentiated only in its outer extent, or more than 50% of it had undergone chemical separation or even developed a core. Another example would be the matching of seismic with magnetic data to get a better overall picture of lunar evolution.
Dr. Pepin noted that 740 people had attended the conference, many more than the previous year; the program committee had purposely included discussions of other planetary and meteorite investigations that revealed much about the first 500 million yr of solar-system history, whose clues still exist in the moon (although hard to interpret) but no longer exist on earth. Experience with other planets had been insufficient to say if they had preserved early solar-system records; "best chances are not," he added. Early solar-system history, especially of the inner planets, was characterized by enormous bombardment of all solid surfaces by objects now referred to as meteorites, but on a scale in those days "that almost suggests we should call them something else." These huge objects clearly left their mark, with evidence that the bombardment took place more than 4 billion yr ago, then rapidly tapered off. Data from Mercury, Mars, and Venus would be expected to show that the historical record had been erased by time, constant impact, and geological activity in which the surface was pounded, dispersed, or remelted.
The intense bombardment had wiped out earth's early geological record too; terrestrial geologists had tried to put the age of the oldest earth rocks farther and farther back, getting in gradual stages as far back as 3.7 billion yr in a large anorthosite deposit in Greenland. This boundary condition for earth geology was one reason for the growing interest in lunar and general planetary studies: the flow of information had been not only from planetary to terrestrial scientists, but also in the other direction. Lunar scientists had begun to examine terrestrial craters such as the 60-km impact phenomenon called Manicouagan: what would have been referred to 5 yr ago as remnants of a Manicouagan volcano had now been established as an impact, mainly because the ease of sampling (greater there than on the moon) had permitted study of energy partition and formation of rock, glass, and melt material in a large-scale impact. Comparative planetology means applying results of studying one planetary surface to explain phenomena on other planetary surfaces. Earth, unlike other planets we know about, continued as a thermally active planet with volcanism, mountain upheaval and wearing down, and had obliterated much of its earlier record. The early stages of the lunar and planetary program focused attention outward; now these studies had provided knowledge applicable to earth, and the generation and development of lunar-surface morphology as a result of external bombardment was only one example of this application.
Over the next 2 to 3 yr, a group of 50 to 100 scientists would be studying in detail the phenomenon of volcanism on all the terrestrial planets as a fundamental stage of planetary development, in a pilot project to define comparative planetology and relate it to a specific aspect. Mercury apparently had basalt flows; Venera pictures suggest recent activity on the surface of Venus that produced what seem to be basalts. Mars clearly had basalts; it had the largest volcano in the solar system, "an enormous structure that would ... cover the state of Kansas if ... plunked down there." In 2 or 3 yr, Dr. Pepin said, we should be able to give an integrated picture of the issuing of basalts from the interior onto the surface, an extremely important process in the development and evolution of a planet.
Life in the solar system was an exciting subject now, said Dr. Hayman, and discoveries were coming in at a pace that would make today's theories outmoded by the time they got into print 6 mo from now. The task of scientists, he said, was to include the general public in the excitement, and to make it filter through to the colleges and universities, to high schools, and even to grade-school levels.
One thing that had changed in the past 20 yr since the days of Harold Urey and Hans Seuss was the concept of the solar nebula and the formation of planets and satellites by accretion. The problem was the noncondensable material in the nebula, and where it went: the solar physicists explained its absence by the theory of a solar upheaval that cleaned out the inner parts of the solar system by a superstorm of ions. Applying thermodynamics to this theory made it possible to calculate which compounds would condense out at what temperature. The Allende meteorite that fell in Mexico in 1969 contained compounds similar to what had been predicted as a result of condensation of the solar nebula at high temperatures. Then, 2 or 3 yr ago the idea arose that the sun and planets had formed not only from gases but also from so-called presolar grains, which had not been specifically identified; their identity on the earth and moon would have been lost over time because of geological processes. So the search shifted to meteorites.
Although none of the grains had been definitely identified, the conference had heard 2 reports that might be interpreted as finding presolar grains. Metallic nuggets in the Allende meteorite were found to consist of platinum-group metals in extraordinarily small fragments, a millionth of a meter, that did not vaporize or melt readily and might be presolar grains (although it would take a lot of work to settle the question, Dr. Hayman said). Also, a group from Berkeley had dissolved carbonaceous meteorites in hydrofluoric acid to get rid of the silicates; the carbon residue was found to be full of gas called "planetary" because its composition differed from that of the sun and was much more like that of earth. The question was how carbon material could have been of planetary origin under the solar-nebula theory: speculation was that the carbonaceous material might predate the formation of the sun and have originated elsewhere. It could not have undergone great heat without being destroyed, so the objects containing the material must have been created farther out, not in the inner region of the sun and terrestrial planets but in the region of the giant planets.
If the heavier elements were synthesized in the stars by nuclear processes, especially in explosions of novas and supernovas that produced all sorts of elements as they blew away their outer envelopes, all the elements are probably represented in this expanding envelope. With rapidly dropping temperatures, the condensation of presolar grains would occur within 10 yr. It would be possible to look at the product of a single event to extrapolate the total of many such events of which all the elements around us would be the product.
Dr. Haskins said in summary that developments in methodology and the availability of more precise measurements would make it possible to supplant earlier measurements. Geophysicists were learning to extract information from bits of material instead of bucketsful or large chunks as they had don m the past. The Apollo program had been responsible for a steady progress in the field of measurements: "there simply was not the funding and interest correlated together to do it prior to that time." Asked what the scientific community had learned about the moon in the 3 yr 3 mo since the last moon mission, Haskins said they were beginning to understand the major stages in the evolution of every planetary body composed of rocky material; the moon had passed through stages that the earth had of reached, and had preserved a record of what had happened-for example, a preview of the kind of rock that would be formed later in earth history. The findings provided a broad framework in which more and different questions could be asked, not just investigation of the more obvious characteristics of the many materials brought back. Queried on the lunar-sample curatorial facility, Dr. Haskins said that moon rocks from the Apollo expeditions were housed in a leaky, flimsy facility that would not protect them for use of future generations of scientists. A new facility was desperately needed, because the present building was not fireproof and the roof leaked; within the building, the rocks had been kept in nitrogen-filled cabinets and handled only in clean-room conditions, to prevent contamination. However, moisture in the surroundings might have led to erroneous deductions regarding the moon environment when scientists analyzed the lunar samples. (Transcript, 7th lunar science conf. press briefing, 19 Mar 76; NASA Release 76-25; JSC Release 76-15; Science, vol. 18'5, 346; 'W Post, 21 Mar 76, A-3)
Congress's Joint Committee on Defense Production, inquiring into government-contractor activities involving hospitality or gratuities toward federal employees, revealed that Rockwell International Corp. had entertained Eugene A. Cernan and Ronald E. Evans, NASA astronauts, at a facility on Bimini in the Bahamas, in addition to 11 other NASA employees who had enjoyed hospitality at a hunting lodge in Md. Both Rockwell and Northrop Corp., another NASA contractor, ran hunting lodges on the eastern shore of Md. where 13 NASA employees and one former employee had acknowledged acceptance of entertainment. The DOD had announced it would reprimand its chief of research, Dr. Malcolm R. Currie, and dock his pay, for accepting a similar weekend from Rockwell. (W Star, 19 Mar 76, A-1; WSJ, 17 Mar 76, 17)
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