NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Donald Wilhelms, Geologist with the US Geological Survey who helped make a geologic mapping of the Moon and trained Apollo astronauts, part 1 of 3

We all said, okay, GK Gilbert, what did he do and then why was that important? Well, GK Gilbert spent, as he says, 1890s telescope and pretty well figured out a good model for the moon, which is most of the creators we see are impact creators and much of the peculiar linearation on the front side of the moon is due to also a big impact and this was entirely a new idea. Not only that, it was completely forgotten for 40, 50 years until Ralph Baldwin came along and rediscovered the same thing. So there was this long gap more than 50 years really where nothing happened in the science of the moon. So GK, I was just for a second, excuse me, what he did and why was important and when is he doing it? Well, we thought we were all, okay, go ahead, time. Well, GK Gilbert in 1892 spent 18 nights at the telescope in the Naval Observatory in Washington looking at the moon. The survey said, isn't there anything better for a chief geologist of the survey to do than gap at the moon? But he came up with the impact model

for the origin of the creators and also an impact model for the origin of some of the striations on the front side which were never understood. And furthermore, we're not understood for another 50 years until Ralph Baldwin picked up and resumed the study of the moon. All in all that time there was very little that made any sense that was done on the moon. It was just a forgotten subject and Baldwin came along and rescued it. So GK was a voice in the wilderness and was interested? Gilbert was completely alone at that time in his interest and then a few, oh, I'd have to call them dilatants, got into it after that, but they didn't contribute anything until Baldwin came along. Okay, Ralph Baldwin, why is he such a pioneer? Baldwin approached the study of creators from all sorts of different viewpoints. He observed explosions. He got the mathematics of the physics of impact. He did experiments himself. He looked in the literature. He covered the entire subject from as many aspects as you

can cover it and came up with the pretty obvious answer that the creators on the moon had to be of impact origin, except it wasn't obvious at the time because most people thought they were volcanic. And that argument went on until, really, I would say, until the mid-60s ranger came along. Photographed the moon very close up. The ranger was a crash landing series of missions that took increasingly more detailed pictures as they got close to the moon. And they showed the small creators that went along with the big creators and fit a mathematical relation that showed that they pretty much had to be of impact origin. Baldwin in 1965 said, well, the debate's over. But he had been saying this quite a long time before. Baldwin had been working on this subject every since he started looking at the moon, which was in the early 40s. And pretty well, he had proved it to anyone who wanted to believe it. Had all the data. But it still wasn't accepted. Just because somebody has done a good job

on some scientific subject, it doesn't mean it's going to be accepted by the rest of the community. And certainly it was not. And then Gene Schumacher came along and covered much of the same ground. And then went to the field and studied from a geologic standpoint, which Baldwin didn't do. He did visit creators on the ground, but he wasn't a geologist, so he didn't take that tack to it. Before we get a little more into Gene, tell me this, what was the climate like in the field? Or was there even a field in the 20s, 30s, 40s? Was anybody seriously scientifically looking at the moon or would these people laugh at? Let me cut this for a second. Okay, 20th century, though, Gilbert was, you know, the 1819. What's in the 30s and the 40s? Is anybody seriously looking at it? There was a moon committee. It was set up by, what was it, I guess, the Carnegie Institute. And they did a little. That's all. There was no serious work until Baldwin. Okay. Baldwin's influence on Gene Schumacher.

I have never been able to determine how direct the influence of Baldwin on Schumacher was. Gene himself, I ask him now, and he didn't remember very well. He must have read Baldwin's books and must have been influenced by them. But to what extent Schumacher would have discovered all these things by himself, I'll never know. Can you just explain to me that the idea in a late person's terms, hot moon versus cold moon? What does that mean? Well, hot moon simply means that internal heat generates the features we see on the surface. It does generate the maria, which are basalts. That was always pretty much the leading idea. Baldwin came up with it, too. But the hot mooners also thought that the internal heat generated the craters, that the craters were volcanic. It was sort of the other calderas or explosion craters or what

have you. Cold moon doesn't mean the moon really is cold, but it means that the craters were generated by impacts, which don't require internal heat. They just require something coming in from the cosmos and striking the surface. Were these cold mooners endorsing Baldwin? The few that were there, but you see that nobody was working on it in the 50s, certainly. Even after Baldwin wrote his first book, Harold Uri did. He read Baldwin's book and became a fanatic, and I've been told a fanatic moon scientist, Harold Uri, even though he's a Nobel Prize in something entirely different. And a few others, and I keep meeting others who said they got their start with Baldwin's 1949 book, but still nothing much happened until Gene Schumerger got back into it in 1960. So all that time, it was more active. Gerard Carper was another one who was into it, and oh, you could name them. Less than a dozen people,

I'm sure we're working on in the 50s. Back to Harold Uri. How did he feel about the impact? Harold Uri was all for impact because he regarded the moon. He was raising from basic principles, as he always said, and from first scientific principles. And that's why he was better at it than geologists, because geologists didn't know about the first principles of science. He wanted the moon to be a primitive body captured by the Earth from somewhere in the solar system, unchanged since its origin, except for a few impacts. So he was entirely opposed and he thought that the internal heat of the moon would alter its surface. He wanted it to be just a cold rock, a 4.5 billion years old, or he could learn all about the early solar system. Another early figure, how and so was he, who was how and what did he do? Masersky was hired by Gene in 1962, I believe, to work with astrogeology branch of the survey. How his original job was to manage the lunar geology mapping and generally organize the

branch in his very early days. There were only 10 people in the branch in those days. And how was one of the very first ones? How I moved on to other things in the branch. And I took over the management of the lunar mapping. He was the mover and shaker. He went to all the meetings and he kept our contacts going with NASA and publicized our work and that sort of thing. Great. The astrogeology center, what was it? How did it get started? It was kind of just for the airplane one second. Great. The astrogeology center, who founded it? How did it get started? What was it? Well, Gene Schumacher, when he became vitally interested in the moon, one of the geological survey to support his investigations and to expand them with other people. So he lobbied the survey to start the astrogeology branch and the funding had to come from NASA. The survey wasn't going to

fund it. And the funding did come from NASA, but only after a certain amount of politicking. But there was enough to get started. And Gene was originally in Mental Park, California, and started the center there. But then he got the idea to move to Flagstaff because meteor crater was there, observatories, lots of volcanic rock around, and good field areas for astronaut training and so forth. So he moved most of the branch there, including the headquarters and left some of us back in Mental Park to be independent of the semi-independent of the Flagstaffers. So this is the U.S. Geological Survey studying the moon? Did Gene, was that a heart and cell for Gene? It was a yes. It was a startover. Gene had a lot of trouble starting getting the survey on NASA to accept the idea. The survey is very conservative, especially, I was going to say, especially in those days, but always really. And they just didn't accept it. And way into the program, after

he had given a great deal of support to NASA and brought in lots of success to the program, they still didn't support it, really. There were some dead, but many just sniffed at the whole idea of studying the moon. Now we're talking early 60s. Why wouldn't NASA be supported by science? Did Gene help to get science into the program? Well, yes. Well, again, I'll start. Gene also twisted NASA's arms to accept science very much so. He spent a year at NASA headquarters right in the teeth of all the early administrators who were getting the program going. And I really, I'm convinced that without Gene's lobbying, there would have been no geology done on the moon and very little other kinds of science, because that wasn't the program. President Kennedy said we're going to land the moon on the man on the moon in this decade and bring him back safely to Earth, and that was all they wanted to do.

Different to offer. I'm fairly sure that if we go to other sites, there will be more to offer, but we also have some specific targets in mind. Apollo managed to produce lots of ideas in us that need testing, that we make predictions. To go back and test them is one of the things that we need to do and see if we're right or wrong, and at the same time produce new questions. Science is all about producing new questions as much as producing new answers. If you're trying to answer the same old questions, you're in a more advanced science. You want new questions to keep going to find out what's really going on. And to do that, we need to go back to the moon to understand the moon, get more questions, get more answers. Now, you'll jump out of a plane with a parachute, but you won't go there. I mean, if you could be popped down there, you'd do it, but why won't you go? I wouldn't go because of the time involved in just preparing to go. I like to do science. I like to do the detective work. I like to do the analyses of rocks and geology,

but I don't want to spend time preparing for all that. And it takes a long time, and then you're there for what? A few days. Maybe if you could go for six months, it would be a lot different, that would be an expedition really worth going for. Do you think the scientist, or rather, I'm sorry, the astronauts who were performing a job of geological observers, especially on the last four missions? Do you think they did a good job? I think they did an excellent job. They were very well trained, and they were very highly motivated for the most part, and one of them, in fact, was a geologist. Jack Schmidt was a geologist. Dave Scott might as well have been a geologist. He was so good at doing the things that he did. And so I have no problem with that. They were very good geologists. I do not think that real professional, freshly trained geologists would have done a much better job at all. There was no time, in any case, in the constraints of an Apollo mission, to really let yourself free to go around and do the sorts of things you would

need to do. And within those constraints, the astronauts did a very good job of observing, and collecting, and photographing. Great. Thank you. Were the vehicles, and they usually have lousy bricks, and things like that. But I think the interesting thing is that 20 years later, after you had that idea, Bill, that I think the consensus has become that indeed there was a giant impact that made RS Moon. It has phenomenal consequences for the Earth, and we've been discussing the idea the early Earth was completely molten, which is an astonishing thing. And yet we still don't really know how to make a moon, after we have that huge impact. What intrigues me about the whole climate, what you just said is that now, very different than 20 years ago, everybody's sitting in the room talking, not just about that one giant impact, but a whole environment in the early solar system, where these impacts were happening all the time to other planets, and more than one to the Earth. I mean, it's a very different conception of the first stages of the Earth than would have been

20 years ago. And it's a self-consistent picture of how this, at least the inner solar system got put together. It makes physical sense. And it's or allow for the formation of trusted planets. That's a very important distinction. But obviously first, we have to be able to explain our own system. Actually, it's interesting, isn't it? Just trying to study the formation of the Moon is really part of a big picture, and that is trying to answer the question in the end, on we alone in the universe, or other habitable planets around other stars. And in order to even have a chance of answering that question, we really do have to have a pretty good understanding of how planetary systems get put together. And we're getting this slowly, but surely. I'm actually an optimist. I'll leave money, we'll find evidence for at least trust real planets around other stars. That's great. Well, leading question. Oh, let's do that. Graham, do you think we should go back to the Moon? Of course, we should go back to the Moon. So much about the Moon that we don't know that we'd like to know. It's all right to make a model of how the Moon developed, but what we really want to know is exactly what our Moon is like to put into that. What do you say to the only deal that people think the Moon is a dead doll place?

We've been there. We've done that. Let's go to Europa and find, you know, giant squid under the ice. There are bunch of bleep, stupid bleep bleep bleep. What was the question? Oh, it's a legitimate question. I mean, you have finite resources to spend on space exploration. And a lot of people are very excited about places like Europa, the satellite of Jupiter that appears to have perhaps an ocean under a layer of ice. How do you make the argument to go back to the Moon when, you know, we've been there, done that, and we haven't been to Europe waves. I mean, do they come every 30 million years, like some people talked about? Collect rocks and date them, and we'd actually know because the Moon is a template. Yeah. I think that's the history of the bombardment of the Earth actually, in a more recent time. Which ties into evolution, your species on the Earth, because apparently, yeah, species are being generated by dinosaurs in a shower of bodies that knows bodies will obstruct the Moon as well. That's a very important question, but I actually think that by a huge body every 100 million years that wipes out 75% of the species, like the Earth did 65

million years ago, then it may be that civilization has never last long enough to get. And how does that change? If you move the position to where the giant planet is, do you get a lot more impacts? Do you not allow for life to develop? That's not actually one of the astonishing ideas, I think recently, and that is if you don't have it