Reading Eagle 27 November 1960 "Building of 'Moonmobile' Is Problem for Scientists by Ralph Dighton (AP)

Reading Eagle 27 November 1960 "Building of 'Moonmobile' Is Problem for Scientists by Ralph Dighton (AP) Full Page

Interesting article published in the Reading (PA) Eagle on 1960.11.27 that discusses the challenges of designing a "Moonmobile" with contributions by Allyn B. Hazard, a member of the JPL team assigned the task.

Reading Eagle 27 November 1960 "Building of 'Moonmobile' Is Problem for Scientists by Ralph Dighton (AP) Article Detail

Transcript:

Building of 'Moonmobile' Is Problem for Scientists They Must Decide If Travel Will Be Over Lava or Sand

Editor's Note: Green cheese it's not, say the scientists. But they can't agree whether the moon is mountains of lava or oceans of sand. The disagreement is giving fits to the men trying to design a moonmobile, who know almost everything except what's most important: Will it need wheels claws?

By RALPH DIGHTON Associated Press Writer

When your ship lands on the moon, will you step out among knife-edged crags jutting from volcano-spawned miles of lava jungle?

Or onto gently sloping plains covered with talcum-fine dust into which you could sink like a rock dropped in fresh snow? 

Search for the answer - which probably lies somewhere between these two extremes - will cost government and industry millions of dollars in the next few years.

When the truth is finally known there will be some very red faces in scientific circles - those who guessed wrong about the kind of vehicles needed to explore the moon's surface.

Within the next year industry will be invited to bid on supplying "moonmobiles" to be carried in rockets already scheduled for launching.

The first moon jeeps will be unmanned, built to be operated by remote control from earth. They will carry a few instruments to give scientists a rough idea of what the moon is like. To a nation accustomed to 300- horsepower automobiles, they will be extremely crude, intended only to move a few hundred feet before their batteries wear out.

These are the basic specifications. Beyond that, the design is up to the individual scientists, and their ideas of the conditions the vehicles will have to overcome differ vastly.

Varied Suggestions

If the craters that pit the moon are extinct volcanoes, the lunar surface might well be fissured no-man's-land, a wave tossed sea turned magically into black stone. No vehicle with conventional wheels could travel far across this type of terrain, and even tractors would find hard going.

Serious study has been given to fat, balloon-like wheels, but no material has been found yet which would resist punctures and still remain flexible in the extremes of lunar temperature - from 210 above to 250 below zero.

Also under consideration are cars mounted on telescoping stilts which would shorten or lengthen hydraulically to adjust to uneven ground. These would be similar to a landing vehicle proposed by Dr. Jack Green of North American Aviation's aero-space laboratories in Los Angeles.

Dr. Green has spent months mapping the vast lava beds on California's Mojave Desert, hunting for "landing sites" like those he believes will confront moon expeditions.

From his studies of several such sites, he has come up with a three-legged vehicle equipped with clams (sic - probably clamps) to grab a foothold on any kind of terrain.

Green is one of those who is sure the moon is volcanic. He has even designed a machine using the heat of the sun to sweat water from pulverized lava.

One aero-space scientist conceives of a contraption like this to land a man on the moon. He suggested the machine, with telescoping stilts, after studying jagged California lava beds which he believes approximate the contours of the moon.

But suppose the lunar craters are not volcanic - that they were thrown up by meteorites splattering against the moon with a force they could never achieve through the earth's cushion of atmosphere?

In that case, the moon's surface would not be covered with lava but more probably with dust flaking down from the ringed peaks, eroded over millions of years by solar radiation and the impact of tiny particles from space.

Among those who lean toward this belief are scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

In the most detailed moon-travel study yet undertaken, three men have spent months collecting what they think are the best guesses on lunar surface conditions, and designing vehicles to overcome them.

Dr. William Pickering, director of JPL, says these are only preliminary studies and that the laboratory's present job is to develop the technology and the machines for unmanned exploration of the moon and the planets. Later, he says, other groups may use these technologies and machines for manned explorations.

JPL's upcoming Ranger moon rockets will carry instruments - among them an earthquake meter made by the seismological laboratory of California Institute of Technology which will determine whether there are volcanoes on the moon.

Until this proof is available, the JPL team is assuming the moon is covered not with lava but with dust.

Some earlier researchers have contended that because the moon has no atmosphere to pack the dust down, it would be soft and feather-fluffy. A vehicle landing on it might plunge down as much as a half mile before hitting hard ground. 

JPL's team, headed by section chief William Schimandle, believes the absence of air has created just the opposite condition. Air would tend to separate and fluff the dust particles, they say; the vacuum of lunar space would let the dust pack down hard.

The dust would fill crevices and any boulders would be buried, they say, so most of the moon's surface must be a flat, hard-packed plain something like the salt flats in Utah. 

What about the "jagged peaks" detected in photographs of the moon?

One scientist's conception of a moon expedition features ships which would land tail down on adjustable legs. The object in the foreground is a man in a space suit, protected from the searing sun by a sort of umbrella and shower curtain. The big problem: determining the texture and contours of the moon's surface and designing a vehicle that could land on it. (AP Newsfeatures Photos)

The best photos, says Schimandle, were taken when the sun was rising or setting. "The resulting shadows have exaggerated lunar contours so greatly that we tend to liken them to the only things comparable on earth-volcanic craters."

Using a recent photograph of the moon, Schimandle points to a great plain called the Mare Imbrium - the right eye of the man in the moon. Rising like a hound's tooth from this plain is a lone "peak" called Mt. Piton which throws a long shadow. 

Shadow Seen as Moutain (sic)

Measurements of this shadow, he says, show that the "peak" actually is a mountain gradually sloping upward over a distance of 13 miles to a height of 7,000 feet. The top is so nearly level that it is difficult to determine the highest point.

Anticipating gentle slopes and hard-packed dust, the JPL team has designed for the first landings a three-wheeled buggy something like the earliest automobiles. They don't plan to build the buggy -"our purpose is to collect data so we can tell industry what we want when the time comes," says Schimandle. 

The buggy has steel-rimmed aluminum wheels six feet in diameter to enable it to cross any small cracks that may remain in the moon's surface. Electric motors will turn the wheels at very slow speeds - 2 to 5 miles an hour.

"It won't need much power because the slopes will be gentle," says team member Allyn Hazard, "and we certainly won't want it to go very fast because of the time lag between the vehicle and the remote operator. 

"The buggy will carry rudimentary television and radar and we figure it will take 1.3 seconds for these signals to reach earth. It will take six-tenths of a second at least for the operator to decide whether to stop the vehicle in front of an obstacle or to go around it. Another 1.3 seconds will be needed to transmit his decision back to the vehicle a total of almost three seconds.

"In three seconds, a vehicle going five miles an hour will travel 22 feet. It could be wrecked before we could stop it. We may have to develop a radar device that will cut off the motor whenever an obstacle looms, thus giving the operator time to catch up with the machine."

Lights Will Be Needed 

The buggy will be equipped with lights because, Schimandle says, "man may have to be a nocturnal animal on the moon, coming out of his shelters only at night.

"We don't know what solar radiation, unfiltered by any atmosphere, will do to men or their equipment. But we believe that anyone venturing out in daylight will at least have to wear something like this:" 

He sketched a man in a spacesuit carrying an umbrella, from the rim of which hung a shower curtain. The umbrella and curtain were made of a thin film of aluminized plastic which, he said, would ward off up to 95 per cent of the sun's rays. 

"Even this may not be enough protection," he added.

"Don't laugh, but it may turn out that we will hope that the moon dust is soft-packed, so we can tunnel through it like moles, using it to shield us from both heat and cold. 

"If so, our three-wheel buggy will have to be shelved in favor of burrowing machines."

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