NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Dr. Gordon Swann, geologist with the US Geological Survey (USGS) and Principal Investigator of Lunar Geology for Apollo, part 1 of 4

Gordon, what was that first field trip like? Who'd you go with? What was it all about? The first one I was involved with was to Big Band in Texas. Ginding Dale Jackson from the USGS was a trip leader, but the area expert was a professor from the University of Texas named Bill Mulberger, who later became very heavily involved in the Apollo program. That was my first trip in the field with astronauts. I had met them several of them, and I was pretty nervous and scared about me teaching an astronaut, you know that one. So, and the first two I got to work with were Tom Stafford and Jim Lovell, who became pretty well known later on. Jim particularly, during Apollo 13. So what was it like, what were your expectations? How did it go over? I think pretty well. Those two were moderately interested in geology, I think, that the astronauts varied a lot in their interests. Some weren't very interested in rocks, and some got very interested in them. And of course, Jack Schmidt has a PhD in geology,

so he was interested to begin with. But I think both Jim and Tom seemed to be fairly interested in things. I don't know who thought it up, but our first job was to teach him how to set the declination on a Brenton, the magnetic death inclination on a Brenton campus. And I don't know why we did that, because you can't use a compass on the moon without a magnetic field. But anyway, that was the first thing I taught him was how to set the magnet and hit a declination on a Brenton campus. Then we had a little mapping exercise out in some folded rocks using aerial photographs. And incidentally, I noticed right then the astronauts were very good at locating themselves on aerial photographs. I think probably they're very used to seeing things in the air and they have a very good perception of things and good eyesight. And all of these guys were very good at locating themselves, or we were in the field. Did they seem enthusiastic? Leveling? Yes, moderately so anyway. I'd say, yeah, they were pretty enthusiastic.

Give me a list of the kind of places that you went on field trips overall. The audience needs to understand, where did you take these guys? And why take them to so many different places? Give me a laundry list of them. Well, first of all, let me say that the subjects we didn't do anything with were paleontology because we really didn't expect to be any fossils or any kind of life on the moon, which there wasn't. We started out by training them in just general principles of geology, things like how layers of rocks and how you can date them and those kinds of things. So one of the very early trips was to Grand Canyon, because that's a classical example of layer cake geology that's very well exposed. No one. We're going to stop it perfect right there. What you guys got me to stop right now. On Apollo 12, Copernicus Ray. How did that relate to impact cratering? The rays?

Yeah, I thought that's what you were talking about. You guys really got me flat footed here. I don't remember talking to you about rays of very specific features. Copernicus. Oh, oh, no. No, it's central uplift, central peak. Okay. Yes, yes. I'll give you a quick, sir. Once upon a time, we were extremely fortunate to have a very capable geophysicist, Dr. H. S. Jones, at the Canadian Defense Research Establishment in Canada, who was in charge of the explosion experimental program for quite some number of years for the Canadian government. And on a large event, 500 ton TNT hemisphere, detonated on the surface of their test site, produced a broad flat-flored crater that was about the size of a football field.

And it had a pronounced central uplift or mound in the middle part of it. Dr. Jones was a student of looking at planetary work to recognize that looked very much like the crater Copernicus on the moon, as well as a number of other craters on the moon that were flat-flored net central peaks. He fortunately was aware of Gene Schumacher's early work, called Schumacher, went down and met him in the United States, and showed him aerial photography of the snow wall explosion crater and cross-sections of it. And Schumacher said, wow, I know exactly what we need to do. We need to get some guy go and look at that. He just started his doctoral thesis on impact cratering, and just by good fortune it turned out that I was a guy that he was referencing. In fact, Gene Schumacher's thesis student at that time, out of Caltech, and he asked me to go up and we looked at it, and here I am.

I've been in holes in the ground ever since then. But it was just really due to the fact that people were beginning to pay a lot of attention to what was going on in the planetary space program. People were beginning to understand that this was going to actually happen, and people were getting excited about it, because it was truly a first. It was the first time to leave this planet. It was the first time to go into space. It was the first time to see another planetary body up close, and lived to tell the tale, come back and talk about it. And so it was just an enormously exciting period of time. Just one final reflection, because the public's always interested in the human aspect of this thing as well. You participated in a fair amount of the training yourself, did you go out with the astronauts yourself? Absolutely. Okay. Who do you, any recollections about, about the astronauts in general, and some specifics about who really impressed you as really being good at this, and really understanding it?

Now, how did you feel about, first of all, astronauts as geologists? You're a geologist. How did you feel that you feel that astronauts should have been doing geology on the moon? Or do you think geologists should have been doing geology on the moon one second? Ready? One, up, five, take three. Okay. Just that we're obtaining, for some reason. Okay. Okay. Don't talk at all. Just be less okay. Okay. And those are the descent imager. If you've seen the images of alphons, this is the volcanic eruption area that Mark is interested in. The descent camera, basically, on the lander. And if you remember, the old ranger missions were- Wait. Okay. Great. Just over the shoulder, maybe. And you need a little bit of fingers moving around on this. Yeah. You've got about 50 feet left. Okay. I guess something, just a mention to you guys, that maybe you can keep an eye out for this sort of thing. These glasses are very pale green. They're so pale that they don't really show up as unique features on a lot of the albedo views. This is very dark, for example.

You can see this very clearly. This is less dark. These are green. In all samples that we found for the lunar surface, we find pale glasses. What do you finger across, again, point to one? We can tell that these glasses are volcanic because they have different chemical composition. We know that these are volcanic. We find volcanic glasses of different kinds in all the samples that we found for biops from Apollo. And some of them are pale. They're pale yellow, pale orange. They don't have high loads of dose and others, they're not dark. So one of the things I'm going to look for, well, there are actually a couple of other pyroclastic deposits up here. Here's one right here. And this is only moderately dark. And in fact, spectrally, it looks a lot like the marine adjacent to this. There's a long, real, this is the Alpine Valley. There's a long real in there, but it doesn't have any associated, any obvious, basalt, and the real itself. All right, good. Terrific. Thank you guys. You guys, right? I don't know.