13 July 2019 | New Scientist | 39involve finally landing on the moon. It all had
to be practised in advance.
The simulation operations moved to the
new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston,
Texas. With better computers and more
functional cockpit simulators – some even
had a moving base to recreate the motion of
a spacecraft – Miller and Koos’s team devised
more sophisticated and complex scenarios.
The mission control building had no
windows, but that hardly mattered, says Miller.
During the run-up to Apollo, the team usually
worked seven days a week, and 10 to 12 hours
a day. There was no time to glance out of the
window, let alone leave the building.
The simulation supervisors began to
develop reputations for being diabolical,
with the crazy, complicated problems they
concocted. “In the Star Wars era, we would
have been considered to be on the dark side,”
jokes Koos. But they had an uncanny knack
for coming up with problems that ultimately
happened during real missions. For example,
they inserted engine failures in several early
Apollo simulations. Then during the uncrewed
Apollo 6 flight, two engines shut down
Our satellite has revealed
secrets of the solar system- and much more besides,
says Stuart Clark
T
HERE have been more than 70 successful
missions to the moon: fly-bys, orbiters,
landers and of course 12 moonwalkers. After
Earth, it is the most studied celestial object
in our solar system. These missions have
unlocked the moon’s geological history,
determined its internal structure and
measured its surface composition. The
conclusions of those explorations stretch
well beyond the barren lunar surface.
“The moon has been Earth’s sister through
these last four and a half billion years,”
says Katherine Joy, a lunar geologist at the
University of Manchester, UK. Like all
siblings, the moon has secrets to tell.
The same astronomical processes that have
influenced Earth have also been felt by the
moon. Yet while weathering and the restless
shifting of the continents on our planet
have largely erased the most ancient events
from our geological record, that isn’t true
of moon rocks. “The moon is a tape recorder
of terrestrial processes,” says Joy.
Decoding the tape began in earnest 50 years
ago, when the first moon rocks were collected
by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
During a 2 hour and 36 minute moonwalk,
they pocketed 22 kilograms of the lunar
surface, then brought it back to Earth for
analysis. Another five Apollo missions added
to the tally, returning a total of 2200 samples
that collectively weigh 382 kilograms.
The dust and rocks kept at the Johnson
Space Center in Houston, Texas, are treated
as a priceless scientific and cultural resource.
“Of the 2200 numbered samples, all but
six have been looked at in some manner
or another,” says Ryan Zeigler, NASA’s lunar
sample curator. About half of each sample
is kept in reserve for future study. And for
good reason. Over the years, improvedWHAT THE
MOON HAS
TAUGHT US
The Mercury Control Center with
simulation capsule (middle) was
where practising for space began.
But everything had to be simulated
in advance, from reduced gravity
walking (far left) to the way the
lunar lander’s engines would kick
up dust (near left).>Nancy Atkinson is a science writer
based in Minnesota. Her latest
book is Eight Years to the Moon:
The history of the Apollo missionsprematurely. Because of the training, the flight
control team knew to burn the remaining
three engines longer to compensate.
The most celebrated instance might be the
“1202” computer alarms that occurred during
the Apollo 11 lunar landing. This obscure error
code signalled that the lunar module’s
navigation computer was overloaded and
needed to reboot. The flight control team knew
how essential the navigation computer was for
the lunar landing, and might have called it off.
However, just a few days before Apollo 11
launched, Koos introduced the same computer
alarms in the final training run, and one of the
flight controllers knew the computer could
handle a reboot. Without that simulation, Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 moon
landing may have very well been aborted,
changing forever the mission’s distinguished
place in space history. ❚THE PRESENT