COLUMBUS – The Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in 1969 brought about a host of technological advances, from sunglasses to cell phones, freeze-dried food to in-ear thermometers.
But an Ohio State scientist says there is still a lot we don’t know about the moon, and did not know in 1969, about the first moonwalk.
Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Wayne Schlingman, director of OSU’s Arne Slettebak Planetarium says – while we learned a lot getting to the moon and back – there are still a galaxy of unknowns:
We did not know at the time of the landing that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin almost ran out of gas before setting the lunar module down on the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969.
Schlingman says Armstrong, with about 60 seconds worth of fuel remaining, rerouted the lander to a second landing spot and he and Aldrin touched down with only about 15 seconds of fuel left to and take off again.
That was one of the things astronaut Michael Collins was thinking about while he was orbiting the moon, waiting for the lunar lander to return.
He knew, if the spacecraft could not take off, Armstrong and Aldrin would die on the surface of the moon and Collins told an audience this week that that left him with a choice.
“I suppose I could commit suicide or I could head home and I was going to head home,” he said.
When Armstrong landed, he sent a message back to NASA headquarters: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. … The Eagle has landed.”
We still aren’t totally sure how the moon formed.
Astronomers mostly think the moon formed when a giant object, roughly the size of Mars, crashed into the Earth, peeled off a layer of the Earth’s crust and sent it spinning into space, where it fell into orbit around Earth, eventually coalesced into one mass, continued spinning and formed the orb that is now the Earth’s moon, Schlingman said.
“We have a lot of evidence that this is true: Certain isotopes when we measure the lunar surface and the Earth’s surface are similar, so that means they’re connected. But it doesn’t answer everything. … We don’t know what’s going on because we don’t know the whole composition of the moon,” he said.
Learning more could require drilling into the moon’s mantle and studying the core, taking samples and testing them to see what they are made of and that would require another trip to the moon, something NASA has said it might do as soon as 2024.
There could be some clues in the moon rocks NASA astronauts brought back and there are plenty left to analyze.
NASA recently announced it would release some of previously unstudied rocks to scientists, something Schlingman said could unlock even more secrets.
“This is exciting, because 50 years ago, we didn’t know what questions to ask about the rocks,” he said. “And now we have better technology and greater understanding: We can analyze these rocks to really get some more answers.”
We know that water exists on the moon but we don’t know exactly how much.
Humans have found only frozen water and in small amounts. But because we know less about the far side of the moon, which never faces Earth, Schlingman says it is possible that more water exists there.
Human left a lot of items behind on the moon, including a gold olive branch as a symbol of peace, communiques from world leaders, moon rovers, patches honoring astronauts from previous missions, and, um, human excrement.
Some of the equipment left behind by Apollo 11 and subsequent moon landings is still working, though. Missions executed by the U.S. and Soviet Union left retroreflectors on the moon for lunar laser ranging experiments.
“We still do this weekly from the Earth to measure how the moon is moving away from the Earth; it is a test of gravity,” Schlingman said.
When the next person takes a “giant step” onto the moon’s surface, they will have to travel farther to get there.