AstralTraveller
05-10-2008, 12:51 PM
At work there is a retired professor who is now an Honoury Fellow, meaning he can use the research facilities but doesn't get paid. He was invited here because of his expertise in X-ray fluorescence spectrography (XRF), a method for determining the elemental composition of rocks, when we got our new XRF. Because of his lax attitude in labs I've crossed swords with him a few times in my role as chair (against my wishes) of the School's OH&S Committee. It is obvious he knows what he is doing but these days you simply must wear shoes in labs and wear protective equipment when handling concentrated acids.
Anyway the other day in the tea room he was relating some stories and went on the comment on how his hand used to shake as he weighed out lunar samples, knowing how many millions of dollars each milligram cost. So I questioned him, and it turns out he was one of the dozen or so geologists who worked on the samples returned by Apollo 11!! :jawdrop:
Of course I immediately accused him of being part of a conspiricy to fabricate the lunar landings...... I then went on the ask just how big that conspiricy would have had to be. By the end of the Apollo missons the team had grown to several hundred scientists who published >10,000 papers in peer reviewed journals. He also commented that, apart from their chemistry, the rocks look quite distinctive - not at all like terrestial rocks. That was when our section maker realised why photoshop was invented. :lol:
He's away for a month at the moment but I'll pick his brain about the lunar rocks when he returns. I know people who have met astronaughts, including moon walkers, and I accept that is a greater privledge, but this is pretty big in my reakoning. And I'll get to quizz him in some detail.
It really is a buzz to know I am working with someone who has that history. I work with hobbit discoverers too but somehow this seems more spectacular. Perhaps I'm just a bit over the hobbit, it's a few years since the paper was published and I knew about it a year before that. (Having TV crews about the place is no longer a novalty, it's just stuff to trip over in the corridor.) I'll pass on any interesting tit-bit I hear about the Apollo missions.
cheers,
David
Anyway the other day in the tea room he was relating some stories and went on the comment on how his hand used to shake as he weighed out lunar samples, knowing how many millions of dollars each milligram cost. So I questioned him, and it turns out he was one of the dozen or so geologists who worked on the samples returned by Apollo 11!! :jawdrop:
Of course I immediately accused him of being part of a conspiricy to fabricate the lunar landings...... I then went on the ask just how big that conspiricy would have had to be. By the end of the Apollo missons the team had grown to several hundred scientists who published >10,000 papers in peer reviewed journals. He also commented that, apart from their chemistry, the rocks look quite distinctive - not at all like terrestial rocks. That was when our section maker realised why photoshop was invented. :lol:
He's away for a month at the moment but I'll pick his brain about the lunar rocks when he returns. I know people who have met astronaughts, including moon walkers, and I accept that is a greater privledge, but this is pretty big in my reakoning. And I'll get to quizz him in some detail.
It really is a buzz to know I am working with someone who has that history. I work with hobbit discoverers too but somehow this seems more spectacular. Perhaps I'm just a bit over the hobbit, it's a few years since the paper was published and I knew about it a year before that. (Having TV crews about the place is no longer a novalty, it's just stuff to trip over in the corridor.) I'll pass on any interesting tit-bit I hear about the Apollo missions.
cheers,
David