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Houston & NASA & Meteorites from Mars
Jim Head had recommended me to colleagues at Johnson Space Center (JSC) and I was surprised when I was invited to apply for a job there. I must admit I harbored bias against the red-neckism and anti-intellectualism stereotypes of Texas, and after ten years I realized Ithey were all true! But my daughter and son were born in Texas and they represent all the other millions of Texans who don't match the stereotype. At Johnson Space Center I settled into my office and waited to be told what to do. No one said anything so I continued work I had been doing at Goddard. After a few months I finally asked one of the managers why they had hired me, what was I supposed to do. He replied that they had lots of excellent lab scientists who made important measurements on lunar samples and meteorites. What they wanted me to do was think. To not be tied down to a particular instrument and data stream but to use any and all data to put together the bigger picture. I was astonished, and somewhat cowered, but decided I had the great job of doing whatever I wanted!
Over the next five years I continued to study Mars and then Venus, but what was most fun was going in a new direction where I knew nothing. There were lots of directions available, but one day I noticed a short abstract on the door of Larry Nyquist that said a meteorite he had studied had an age of 1.3 billion years and the very last sentence said a rock that young might be from Mars. What? Did we have a piece of Mars here on Earth, here at JSC? If it was possible that we had meteorites from Mars on Earth they could tell us a vast amount about that fascinating planet that we lacked certain knowledge of. So I set about investigating and found out that there were 9 meteorites of three related types that all had ages of 1.3 b.y. or less. All other meteorites had ages of about 4.3 to 4.5 billion years - they formed and died when the solar system was young. Because I wasn't knowledgeable enough of petrology, geochemistry and isotopes (some of the major disciplines involved in understanding meteorites) I asked the post-doc Lew Ashwal to work with me. Lew did not match the standard image of a scientist - he was a hippy looking guy with a strong New York attitude, was a member of a rock and roll band, and wore green tennis shoes. And Lew was smart and understood all the things I didn't. Together we put together a talk for the upcoming Lunar & Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) showing that the 9 meteorites with young ages were chemically and isotopically unrelated to all other meteorites and that they most likely came from Mars. And if so we could then give specifics about Mars' geologic history.
I was a member of the planning committee for the upcoming LPSC and was interested to see what the reaction would be to our abstract. I overheard the senior scientist who was organizing the meteorite sessions - where our talk was submitted - say that our paper was rubbish and they couldn't include it with the meteorite talks, so it was shunted over to the Mars session, and that's where I gave the talk, SNC Meteorites: Igneous Rocks from Mars? When the title of the talk was announced during the Mars session there were catcalls and laughter - the audience didn't think much of meteorites from Mars. I presented the slides and words of the talk for 10 minutes and then the questions started. Every question was disbelieving. The one I remember best was from Jay Melosh, a bear of a man with a similar towering stature as a scientist. He said it was physically impossible to accelerate rocks off the surface of Mars without melting them - the SNC meteorites were not melt rocks, so my proposal for their origin must be wrong. In response I pointed out that the meteorites existed (which to me was more real than any theory), that they almost certainly didn't come from an asteroid, and that Mars best matched their characteristics. And I quoted Mark Twain: Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how unlikely, is the truth. One year later, at the next LPSC there were two full sessions - 26 talks - devoted to meteorites from Mars. What had been heretical was now becoming conventional wisdom, and I was forgotten.
In January 1985 the Italian volcano Etna erupted and I realized that the astronauts currently orbiting in the Space Shuttle could document the event with photographs. But I wasn't able to figure out how we could send the astronauts a message to look for the eruption cloud. Before the next mission I had discovered that JSC did have a small group that trained astronauts to do Earth observations from orbit and I became a volunteer team member. At that time Earth observations was a robust NASA endeavor with satellites acquiring pre-programmed images and data. But satellites were missing volcanic eruptions, deforestation, and ocean eddies because ground controllers didn't know when and where they were happening and thus couldn't command the satellites to take a picture. With trained astronauts in orbit it was possible to observe the Earth in a new way - in a discovery mode. We gave astronauts specific targets to photograph with their handheld Hasselblad cameras, but more importantly we taught them about anomalous types of events that couldn't be predicted and asked the Shuttle crews to look for them and document them with photos. The astronauts loved this assignment - especially the pilots and co-pilots, for they had less to do once the Shuttle was safely in orbit.
After about a year, the person directing the Earth Obs program retired and I was appointed the new manager. I was able to hire some new scientists to improve our preparation of training manuals and briefings of crews. One of the best aspects of the Space Shuttle Earth Observations Program, as it was called then, was cranking thru the large rolls of 70 mm file the day after the astronauts landed, just after the film was developed. The astronauts would commonly come to look at the film too and they would describe what they saw as we hunched over the light table with magnifying lenses in our hands. This was an experience that no one else on Earth had - we got to review the status of the dynamic Earth, looking at things sometimes that no one else knew about, with the astronaut photographers there to answer questions.
As the astronauts became more and more excited about Earth Obs - because of what they observed and our evangelistic lectures - they took more and more photos of the Earth. Finally, the Public Affairs office sent the astronaut office a letter wondering why they were taking thousands of photos when all PR needed were a few to document the mission. We had succeeded in transforming a PR task into a science program!