The use of space technology to develop techniques and devices to help support the American dollar and determine the origin of the moon and solar system is discussed

Okeefe, J. A.

English

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BENEF TS OF SPACE RESEARCH TO THE NATURAL SCIENCES 
By Dr. John A. 0' Keefe 
Assistant Chief for  Planetary Studies 
Laboratory for Space Physics 
NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center 
I want to begin with the problems that have to 
do with the practical applications of the studies of 
the moon. "Are we really on the planet best suited 
for  the human species?" If you ask this question 
seriously, the answer that suggests itself is that 
perhaps we are  not. A s  you know, the body plan 
that we al l  share here is that of a rather small mon- 
key, sort of bent forward. In this creature most of 
the soft parts were slung from the backbone where 
it would be natural, like a suspension bridge. In 
putting the thing in the erect posture and increasing 
the mass a great deal, these parts sort of slope 
down, like a bunch of sacks hung from a vertical 
pole. It does not work very well. I t  works, I assure 
you, progressively worse a s  you grow older. This 
is a source of a lot of our bodily difficulties - flat 
feet, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, and several 
other things. What I suggest is that a lot of this 
trouble comes from the fact that we a re  on a planet 
on which the force of gravity is stronger than that 
which would be best suited for creatures built the 
way we are. Ultimately, the agony of childbirth 
stems also from this fact. We a r e  trapped in this 
situation by the rather large force of gravity of the 
planet that we live on. So I want to suggest that 
eventually we may find it to our advantage to shift 
to a planet where the force of gravity is less, and 
where we do not have this painful problem. 
In our office we have been doing some work on 
the surface of the moon, and Adler has been doing 
some work on it. One of his ideas concerned an 
apparatus of about the size of a flat iron which would 
direct alpha particles down at the lunar surface. 
Some X-rays would come back, and he would analyze 
them to find out of what the lunar surface was com- 
posed. He never could get approval for that, but, 
with the aid of Dr. Giacconi, he discovered that the 
sun sends energetic X-rays down which generate 
other X-rays, which are characteristic of the lunar 
surface. In this way he was able to analyze the 
whole thing by using the sun instead of his apparatus. 
A great deal of work has been done by this method 
in analyzing the lunar surface. He has thought that 
the back side of the moon is mostly anorthosite, 
something like the Adirondacks. The front side of 
the moon is confirmed, but everybody thought that 
there were basalts everywhere. But the most strik- 
ing thing is that he never seems to find any large 
amounts of magnesium. The inside of the moon 
has got to be magnesium, not pure magnesium, but 
MgO and magnesium silicate, MgzSiOr or  MgSiO,. 
The point is that i t  has to  be made largely of MgO. 
We have been told that the maria, the great black 
spots on the moon, a r e  places where meteorites 
came down and eviscerated the moon, got the guts 
out, and spread them on the outside. So we should 
have areas  on the moon that a r e  covered with MgO, 
large amounts of it. But we do not find it; therefore, 
something is radically wrong. 
A s  you know, right now the almighty dollar is 
having the worst time since the days of George 
Washington, when they papered the walls with them. 
The value of the dollar, in terms of gold, is drop- 
ping. This is because of the fact that we are  having 
an excess of imports over exports; we are  not mak- 
ing money a s  a country; the nation a s  a whole has a 
net outflow of gold, and that is making trouble for 
us. I t  is this trouble, devices that have been devel- 
oped in the Lunar Program - electronic control de- 
vices o r  computers, both of which were an impor- 
tant part of the satellite program - which a re  the 
kinds of things that a r e  now earning us dollars. 
Those a re  among the important exports which a r e  
not being balanced by corresponding imports. In 
other words, the U. S. computer industry is earn- 
ing dollars for the U. s. and is helping us in this 
dollar crisis. A l l  the other space-related hardware 
is also earning us  money because we have a net of 
import balance on it. In the hardest, coldest, blood- 
iest sor t  of sense, the dollar is being held up by the 
space industry. You cannot get much more practical 
than that! 
A second field of effort which we have been in- 
volved in is the study of impact metamorphism. I 
will tell this story because I got mixed up in it, not 
very much, but I was involved in it. About 15 years 
ago, I went to dinner with Shoemaker out a t  Ames. We 
were talking about tektites, of course. Shoemaker 
handed me a little chunk of rock, rather roundish, 
and he said, "If tektites come from the moon, you 
should see things like that, because that is what we 
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19730005130 2020-03-17T07:52:02+00:00Z
found in a meteorite crater and it looks like what 
would be thrown out." So I took the thing back. 
Being an astronomer, I handed it to Paul Lowman, 
geologist, and said, "Shoemaker says if we ever get 
anything from the moon i t  will look like this, be- 
cause this was thrown out of a meteor crater.?? 
Lowman sliced it and looked at the thing under a 
microscope, the way they do. Then he sent the 
thing over to the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) , 
because there was something that he did not under- 
stand. The U. S. Geological Survey analyzed i t  by 
X-ray and they found coesite in it. A little later 
a fellow from the USGS came over to see me, and 
he said, "DO you know what coesite is?" "No," I 
said. He said, 'Well, let me explain it. It is  a 
high-pressure polymorph, a high-pressure form of 
quartz, produced, evidently, by the impact." So 
I went around to see one of the fellows in my office 
named McDonald, Gordon McDonald, and asked, 
"Gordon, do you know what coesite is?" He an- 
swered, "Yes, I do." It turned out that he had been 
looking for coesite in the rocks of the earth for about 
7 years and had never found it. This is an effort 
directly supported by the space effort. We look at 
this thing, because we were trying to study the moon. 
But that is not the end of the story. 
The first result of the coesite discovery was 
that we now had a tool by which we could recognize 
impact craters. Coesite is  produced by impact. It 
is a high-pressure form that takes 16 kilobars. You 
cannot get that kind of pressure on the earth, except 
a t  great depths. The astounding thing was that once 
the mineral had been recognized, they went out to 
the meteor crater  and found this unknown mincral 
in carload lots around there. In places it was about 
7 percent of the rock. Imagine, an unknown mineral 
in a well-studied site, available in carload lots ! 
They discovered another mineral, stishorite, in the 
same place, also formed by high pressure, but this 
was only available in about 1 percent of the rock. 
Now with these two minerals, they went to a l l  kinds 
of places. Shoemaker went to a church in Nb'rdlingen, 
Germany, on the way to an international congress. 
The walls of the edilice looked like meteor crater  
material, so he got a piece from a quarry nearby, 
sent i t  back to the USGS; i t  showed coesite in it. 
Shoemaker walked into the International Geological 
Congress and said that this crater - which i s  some 
25 km across, with a whole city sitting inside of it - 
is the result of a meteorite impact on the surface of 
the earth. Professor Wagner of Tybingen said, "I 
have gone over the Rieskessel for 55 years and nobody 
can pick up a single rock on a Sunday afternoon and 
tell me what the Rieskessel is." But he was wrong; 
that is exactly what had happened. What has come 
out of that beyond this, is the following: There has 
been a tremendous effort in the study of impact for- 
mations of all kinds. We have discovered about 60 
impact craters across the world and mineralogically 
identified them a s  being of this kind. In addition, 
De Carli and Jamison in the U. S. said that there 
a r e  diamonds in the meteor craters, in the irons. 
And Nininger had stated that those diamonds were 
probably because of shock. H i s  reasoning was, 
"If coesite is made from quartz by shock, maybe 
diamonds can be made from graphite by shock." 
They got together, and according to De Carli' s 
story a s  he told me, he took a barrel  of water and 
about a s  much graphite a s  i t  takes to make a lead 
pencil, and 1 lb of gun powder and made diamonds 
out of it. These diamonds were very tiny, so tiny 
that they could not even be used a s  an abrasive. 
Recently, we have discovered how to sinter them so 
they can now be used a s  an abrasive. By this 
method, diamonds were produced in pound quantity. 
It is a new industrial process which will eventually 
be of great importance. My cousin's wife came 
out to visit me from Stanford Research Institute a 
while ago, trying to figure out how she could sell 
these diamonds for any reasonable purpose. They 
a r e  so fine that a t  the time the only thing they could 
think of was to  paint them on the outside of automo- 
biles so that they would not scratch. 
Another thing that came out of it was that 
Harold Urey had a theory which is called "Diamonds, 
Meteorites, and The Origin of the Solar System. I '  
It is published in the Astrophysical Journal, 1950 
o r  thereabouts. The basic idea of this theory was 
that there a r e  diamonds in the meteorites. This 
means that the meteorites had to be under great 
pressure when they were formed. The only way to 
put them under great pressure was to put them in 
a center of a body, a large planet. The planet had 
to be as big as the moon, and therefore, this theory 
was that the whole solar system was composed of 
objects which once had been moon size and had been 
broken down to form the solar system and then re- 
built to make the planets. Well ,  our idea collapsed 
because now that we had the coesite, it was clear 
that shock can make these high pressure polymorphs, 
like diamonds. There were no grounds to assume 
any longer that the meteorites had ever been inside 
very big objects. There was a battle about this issue 
that lasted about 4 to 5 years. The conclusion was 
just as I have stated, there is no reason to assume 
that the solar system was formed this way. 
304 
There is another implication. We went out to 
look at Sudbury. Bob Dietz had been there, and had 
found some queer looking things around Sudbury 
called shadowcones. The shadowcones a re  supposed 
to  be from meteorite impact. So Dietz had suggested 
back in 1950 that the Sudbury feature was produced 
by a meteorite impact. Bevan French went out 
there in my place because he did not believe what 
Dietz had said, but he came back a believer; he 
found, in the Sudbury material, not coesite, but some 
of the other marks of impact metamorphism. I should 
say that in the 4 o r  5 years between the discovery 
of coesite and the time when French went to look at  
Sudbury, there had been a tremendous development 
of this scientific impact metamorphism - not only 
with coesite, but also with quartz, and especially 
with TGbingen, in Germany - a development in 
which they saw planar features in quartz, which are 
marks of impact metamorphism. So French came 
back and he identified the Sudbury structure a s  an 
impact structure. He has now convinced the other 
students of Sudbury (and there a r e  some people who 
study Sudbury with a good deal of enthusiasm) that 
it is impact. The reason why people study Sudbury 
with such enthusiasm is that 75 percent of the 
free world's nickel comes from Sudbury. It is one 
of the world's greatest mining sites. Sudbury is 
25 percent of the mineral wealth of Canada, and the 
backbone of the International Nickel Company. Bil- 
lions of dollars have already been taken out of it. SO 
you cannot really claim that information on how such 
structures a re  formed is not of considerable prac- 
tical importance! 
W e  have already discussed the implications of 
this new science which began - I point out again - 
a s  a study directed toward the moon. The whole 
interesting field of impact metamorphism came out 
of the lunar study. until very recently, we have nut 
had actual lunar samples to  deal with. W e  had been 
thinking about what they would be - we have actually 
had to think about what the samples would look like, 
to plan for  them. I t  is out of this planning that this 
wonderful new work has come. 
How does research of this type tie in with cos- 
mology? In the moon there were once tiny blips of 
nickel iron, which have since disappeared. In the 
earth, we know where they went; they went to its 
core. But the problem of problems with respect to 
the moon is, where is the moon' s nickel? Nickel 
is one of the siderophiles; you would never purchase 
a nickel ring. Gold and platinum are  also gone. 
Where did they go, where did the siderophile ele- 
ments of the moon go? The most logical and ob- 
vious answer is that they went down to the core of 
the earth, and the moon is formed from the outer 
mantle of the earth. I have done some mathematical 
developments which show that you can make this 
theory stand up and walk. Thus, through these stud- 
ies of the moon, we are working backward toward 
the origin of the solar system. I believe this proc- 
ess of fission, the formation of the moon from the 
earth, is fundamental to the way in which the solar 
system itself was formed. Perhaps we can partici- 
pate in this enormous intellectual adventure that 
Dr. Giacconi was talking about, in which we study 
the beginnings of things, both through X-ray astron- 
omy and also through the study of the rocks which 
lie about us everywhere. If we really look back at  
the history of cosmology, we see that a key point in 
it, one that astronomers never acknowledge, was in 
1948 o r  1949 when Patterson and Urey showed that 
the earth must be 4.5 billion years old. The astron- 
omers went back and had a quick look a1 llisir figures 
and recalculated the distance scale based upon the 
Cepheid variables. Everything got switched &round 
and suddenly the universe became a good deal older 
than 4.5 billion years. That was one of the hard 
facts - the hinge on which the whole thing turns. 
Geology can give you hard facts which a re  mighty 
useful in the welter of beautiful new results of the 
type that Giacconi was talking about. You do need 
a few things that you can absolutely bet on. 
Recently, the meteorite people have shown 
that a t  the time when the meteorites were formed, 
there had just been a supernova o r  something like 
that - something had produced enormous amounts 
of fresh nuclear materials, because there was radio- 
active iodine-129 and radioactive plutonium-124 in 
the meteorites when they were formed. Which means 
that 4.5 billion years ago, within a few hundred 
million years before that - say 4.7 billion years 
ago, but not earlier than 4.8 billion years ago - 
there was some kind of a nuclear event producing 
radioactive material in the immediate vicinity of 
the solar system, a par t  of which reached the earth. 
Thus, when you get the geological background, the 
rock background, you get a lock of a different kind; 
a lock that will not be fitted by just any key but only 
by the right key. So there a re  two kinds of things 
that a r e  needed: We need these diffuse observations, 
and we also need the very hard results that come out 
of hard-rock studies, because they finally define 
the thing. 
In conclusion, these a re  some of the things that 
we hope to get out of the space program. We hope 
to get new techniques and new devices which will 
partly support our dollar and partly tell us things 
about the moon. We hope to see deeper into the 
305 
origin of the moon, and with it, the origin of the 
solar system. Eventually, we hope to be able to 
look back to this event which is  at the beginning 
of the solar system and back toward these fasci- 
nating cosmological things that Dr. Giacconi has 
been talking about. 
Transcribed from tape 
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