Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
HILO, Hawaii >> The area in which the Ranger 7 Moon cameras landed looks "very much the same, but not exactly the same as the lava beds of Mauna Loa," the top analytical scientist of the highly successful Moonshot said today.
Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper, Dutch-born astronomer who also heads the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, told the Star-Bulletin in a phone interview from Tucson today that his previous assessment of broad Lunar terrain features is essentially unchanged by a study of more than 4,000 photos televised back by Ranger 7 before impact.
He said in a letter to Governor John A. Burns last spring that Mauna Loa’s slopes "are unequaled by any similar natural phenomena on the several continents on which I have traveled and are more typically Lunar terrain than any other lava fields I know."
After studying the Ranger photos, he said this morning he still thinks Mauna Loa would make an excellent "practice area" for future astronauts.
"The area the rocket landed in is a lava field," he said.
"But it is clear now that the Moon has received a battering from innumerable small particles, which have somewhat changed these features."
He said the substance covering the Moon, which many scientists previously believed was dust, now appears to be "more like crusty snow."
This probably was formed by the innumerable impacts which struck with great force, because there is no Lunar atmosphere to inhibit them, and pulverized area of the crust, he said.
But, he added, this pulverized material probably was then "vacuum welded" to a texture of crunchy snow.
He said he does not believe this material could be compared to the pumice thrown out by Hawaii’s volcanoes, but that the "crusty snow" would be a more apt comparison.
Dr. Kuiper, just back in Tucson from meetings with Congressional committees and other Washington officials, was to return later today to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for further consultation on the Moon photos.
"We’re putting in 16- to 20-hour days," he said.
