NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Dr. David "Dave" J. Roddy, Astrogeologist at the US Geological Survey, part 1 of 2

Well, actually, it was more than impact cratering. If you go back just a wee bit in time when our president decided that we were going to go to the moon, there were two major questions that had to be solved. Number one was that we hadn't been in space before, not very far into space anyway, and the technology was in the state of being developed at that period of time, and to develop to go all the way to the moon was a non-trivial issue to say the least. The second issue that was a major important was what are you going to do when you get there? Would it be purely engineering? Would it be purely science? Or would it be some combination thereof? And I think NASA wisely decided there would be a combination thereof, of which getting the guys there and back was a paramount importance, of course, but learning something in route was of almost of equal importance, but certainly had to take back seat to the engineering

that was necessary to get the people to the lunar surface and then back to the Earth again. And so we elected to play a role in the science portion of it, and this was led principally by Gene Schumacher's foresight. And basically what he said was, if we're going to go to the moon, we need to learn something. We really want to understand more than just what's on the surface. And that involved the major processes, or looking at the major processes, that form planetary surfaces, which involve both impact and volcanism, both of which have modified the surface and all the planet surface to a tremendous degree. And that basically was where we began to pick up with Schumacher's leadership in looking at the techniques of training the astronauts to go to the lunar surface, a totally alien environment, and learn something while they were in a spacesuit and while they were many,

many miles from home and where the service station was basically a long way. So what did you do in terms of impact cratering? How many places did you take these guys? What kind of things did you want to show them? A bunch. I can't give you a specific number without looking it up, but it involved looking at different types of surface features, different kinds of volcanic features, and different kinds of impact features. And of course, the main feature that we were interested in in the area that I was working on was the impact craters. Give me a list of the kind of locations. I know you can't name them all. Well, meteor crater was prime. That was visited by every astronaut that went on an appolomation at least once and sometimes they were out there twice. Other missions, I'm sorry, the other areas of requirements involving volcanism, involving surface morphology led the astronauts to the San Francisco volcanic field, which is

just east of Flagstaff, Arizona. It took them to the Hawaiian Islands. It took them to Canada. It took them to Iceland, a number of places around the world, to look at very specific features that looked like the best analogs for what we thought you would see in detail on the moon. Interesting. Talk to me about the lunar simulations trying to create these impact. What did you do? Why? Well, once again, NASA was determined to get the astronauts to the moon. And get them back. We've already emphasized that and I think you can appreciate the interest the astronauts had in that programming. But in doing that, they elected certainly for 11 and 12 and actually through 17 to choose landing sites that were reasonably safe and lie within the constraints of the equipment that was going to be utilized, that it's getting down to the moon and getting off the

moon. But that basically said in simplest terms, was you didn't want to land in a roughest place that you could possibly land. You didn't want to land on the site of a cliff. You didn't want to land in the bottom of a hole that you couldn't get out of. And so they chose regions. In fact, our organization, our branch in the US Geological Survey was partly responsible for mapping the moon in enough detail so that you could go to the lunar surface with some degree of confidence to point X and if you landed very close to point X, you would have a reasonably safe terrain to land in. And still, you would have a reasonably interesting terrain to collect scientific information from. So it was too full. It wasn't just being the safest place in the world, but it was a place that had some information that would be of use to unraveling the history of the lunar of the moon. How did you help that process out specifically? One of the things that we specifically did was try to create and not only try, we did simulate the lunar surface for 11 and 12 and some of the later missions at the Cinder Lake

Field, which is not a lake, it's actually centers that came out of the volcanic cinder cones, formed this flat-lying surface. And we took dynamite charges and went out and blew holes in the ground. And we did it with a specific plan in mind. One was to create the same general density or number of craters for the Apollo 11 and 12 sites. Let me stop. You could... Like. And so the initial field trip, I think, was out to meet your crater Arizona. That was really the first crater that ever had been identified as having been caused by impact. And it's a beautiful structure. It's all laid out so you can see the geology nicely. So he took the original mercury astronauts out there. And he took others over the years. He built up quite a group that were involved in the astronaut training.

He didn't do it all himself. It was a big effort within astro-geology to do that. And it involved a few people from elsewhere and involved people like Lee Silver and Farouk El Baas, but there were an awful lot of the geologists from here that did that. Let me stop you saying you can't change the film. Good. Sean, if you want to use my brand jacket, you can't, you know, it's really a much of the club. Yeah, it's still coming through. Yeah. Yeah.