Columbia Goes to the Moon

Columbia Magazine ^ | Summer 2019 | Paul Hond

[COBOL2Java]

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On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, Gary Latham ’65GSAS, a thirty-three-year-old geophysicist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, arrived at NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center (now the Johnson Space Center) in Houston to witness the fulfillment of thousands of years of curiosity and wonder: humanity’s first attempt to land men on the moon.

Four days earlier, Latham, along with millions of others around the world, had stared rapt at a TV screen as a 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket lifted off in a Zeusian thundercloud from Cape Canaveral. Atop the rocket was the Apollo 11 spacecraft, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Also onboard, but attracting a lot less attention, was the Passive Seismic Experiment Package (PSEP), a system of four solar-powered seismometers that Latham had developed for the mission.

At training sessions in Clear Lake, Texas, Latham had shown the astronauts exactly how to rig PSEP, which would measure the seismic waves caused by disturbances of the lunar surface, whether from meteorites or — if such things existed — moonquakes. The readings would provide the first scientific glimpse into the interior properties of the moon and help tackle questions as old as time: what was the moon’s structure, its composition, its origin, its history?

But first the spacecraft had to land. As the Apollo 11 crew, 240,000 miles away, prepared their next precision maneuver, Latham registered the intense focus and bottled-up emotion at Mission Control. Cigarette smoke hung thick over the beige consoles, with their red and yellow buttons and cathode-ray-tube monitors. On the front wall, a screen marked the progress of the flight on a plotted graph.

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Aldrin carries PSEP to its deployment site. (Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA’s Johnson Space Center)

[COBOL2Java]

My friend's dad worked with Doc Ewing and Gary Latham on that project. Doc Ewing was his dad's mentor at Columbia and took him with him to Texas.

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Gary Latham (left) monitors the signal from his experiment. (NASA)

[tm61]

Shirt pockets filled with pens, and a pack of
smokes., times have changed a bit since then

[Yardstick]

Engineers really looked the part back in the day.

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*

[SunkenCiv]

That was a really good day.