![]() ![]() Whitaker moved to America to join Kuiper’s group and moved to Arizona with him. And the idea of huge impacts ultimately led Hartmann and others to suggest that the Moon formed as a result of a giant impact on Earth, an idea that is still the basis of the leading theories of the origin of the Moon.īut one of the most impressive feats of converting those telescopic images into crucial information for Apollo came from Ewen Whitaker, an unassuming Englishman who had been the only one to respond to Kuiper’s solicitation in 1955. Hartmann realized that this might have been what all those basins had once looked like, before later impact craters and lava flows smeared out detailed features. Furthermore, it had a distinct bull’s-eye appearance, with concentric mountain ranges forming the rings. But it had some crucial differences.įor one thing, it had fewer later impact craters within it, suggesting it was younger and better preserved. Graduate student William Hartmann, while moving around the globe to take the “rectified” images, noticed that on one edge of the Moon, there was a feature – now known as Mare Orientale – that looked a lot like many of the basins that were well known to telescopic observers. Although the idea had been suggested before, the “Rectified Lunar Atlas” was probably the best use ever made of the technique.įurthermore, the process yielded scientifically valuable insights. Near the edges of the visible portion of the Moon, the shapes of features shifted, with ovals becoming circles and squiggly lines becoming detailed structures. By moving around the globe, the surface features then appeared as they would from overhead. To correct for this, the group made a white globe three feet in diameter, then projected a high-quality telescopic image onto it from down the hallway. But even on the side facing the Earth, the areas away from the center always appear distorted. The Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth. But the group realized they could do better than this. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory’s first lunar atlases simply consisted of the best images from a telescope. Looking at the Moon from another direction Once I started learning the stories and talking to those involved, though, I came to appreciate the number of extraordinary things that were done in that era as a result of the political race to the Moon. Similarly, I didn’t think much about the groundwork that went into mapping the Moon until I ended up at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. I eventually spent my career studying rocks from space. But when I got the chance to study Apollo samples in graduate school, it’s not surprising that I gravitated to them. Like most of us who watched all those missions, I didn’t really expect to go into space science or aerospace engineering. ![]() Later they used images from robotic spacecraft to the Moon to produce a series of increasingly sophisticated atlases of the lunar surface.Īs a child, I was focused on the accomplishments of the astronauts, starting with the day in 1961 that the principal burst into my kindergarten classroom to tell us that Alan Shepard had been launched into space, and culminating in the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. Suddenly, the niche pursuit of making maps of the Moon had turned into a national priority.įor the next several years, Kuiper’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory produced progressively better images of the Moon, using telescopes built for the purpose. ![]() Kennedy announced that a national goal for the decade was to send a man to the Moon and back safely. There he could take advantage of the region’s mountaintops and clear skies, and the university’s willingness to move into a field of study that defied traditional departmental boundaries. Kuiper proceeded, though, and by 1960, he had moved his small operation to the University of Arizona in Tucson. Furthermore, Kuiper wanted to make a map, and that’s the sort of thing that geologists, not astronomers, do. After all, telescopes were designed to look at distant objects, and the Moon is rather close, and boring as well, since its appearance doesn’t change. That was indicative of the astronomical community’s general attitude toward the Moon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |