Science Night at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History

Me and Rachel (a fellow grad student) hosted a table on July 20th, 2019, at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History’s Apollo 11 50th anniversary event, “A Trip to the Moon.”

Our table! The black surfperch display that we were next to is unrelated, haha.

At our table, we had a topographic globe of the Moon complete with little labels for the landing sites of each of the Apollo missions, a chart to explain how phases of the Moon work, a coffee-table-style book of Lunar Orbiter photos, a model of the Lunar Module, and I made little cutouts of the components of the Apollo spacecraft so I could show how the components had to rearrange after launch.

Our table’s (for some reason Soviet-themed) little title poster. We ended up talking about the Moon as a whole, rather than Moon rocks. Dammit Jim, I’m a physicist, not a geologist!

The three-hour event was VERY busy! We were talking to people the entire time. Having the Moon globe helped a lot; it prompted a lot of good questions. Many people know that we have seen the far side of the Moon with spacecraft, but don’t know much about it. When they would hold the Moon globe and spin it around to see the far side, their reaction was often “Whoa! The far side looks so different than the side we see at night!” This was a perfect segue into talking about what makes the maria and the highlands so different.

A favorite of mine was explaining how the Apollo spacecraft transformed from the complete package atop the Saturn V to the little capsule that splashed down in the ocean. Using the cutouts that I made, I was able to explain how the spacecraft had to split apart and turn around to extract the Lunar Module before heading to the Moon. The amazement that people got from finding this out was so fun!

Thank you to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History for hosting A Trip to the Moon, and to Rachel for being my table co-host :)

For more on Apollo 11, I HIGHLY recommend the website apolloinrealtime.org/11 and the 2019 movie Apollo 11.

Field Trip to the USS Hornet

On day two of NASA’s Exploration Science Forum (held this year on July 23-25 at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA), conference attendees took buses up to Alameda, located in the East Bay, to visit the USS Hornet. The USS Hornet is the ship that retrieved the Apollo 11 astronauts after their splashdown in the Pacific, and we were visiting it 50 years later to the day!

Once we boarded the ship (which is now permanently docked in Alameda), we had some time to explore before the panels began. I saw the Airstream trailer where the ‘plus three’ were quarantined following their splashdown, a capsule whose landing test onto the ground didn’t go well, and a lot of interesting aircraft.

Out of fear that a ‘Moon bug’ would kill everyone once the astronauts returned, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins stayed in this modified Airstream for three weeks!

After exploration time (during which I got a pair of NASA socks as a souvenir!), the first panel was four crewmembers who were working on the ship when it retrieved the astronauts. They said that since the Hornet had been at sea for a while before it was tasked with retrieving the astronauts, they were disappointed that they didn’t get to go home sooner! He said that “history is often wasted on 22-year-olds.” I learned that the Hornet did practice retrievals, where they would drop a capsule in the ocean, sail away, then come back and retrieve it as if it were the real deal. The Hornet had a busy 1969: after getting the Apollo 11 astronauts in July, it also picked up the Apollo 12 astronauts in November.

The next panel was on lunar geology and was hosted by lunar scientists of all different levels: a current grad student, mid-career researchers, and Jack Schmitt, the Apollo 17 astronaut who is the most recent person to have walked on the Moon. A recording of the panel can be seen here.

Near the end of the panel, the moderator encouraged members of the public to ask questions of the panel. One person asked Jack Schmitt “What was going through your mind when you first set foot on the Moon?” His answer was first “I was trying not to fall over!” His commander had landed such that there was a large rock near where Schmitt was exiting the capsule. But after he successfully did not fall over, then he was able to appreciate the Moon’s landscape.

Visiting the USS Hornet was great fun! Many thanks to NASA and SSERVI for making this trip a part of this year’s Exploration Science Forum.

The USS Hornet retrieving the Apollo 11 astronauts on July 24th, 1969. (Image from Wikipedia)

Welcome to the blog!

Hello! This blog will be a space where I can write about science, grad school, and career-related things as I work my way through my PhD and beyond. Stay tuned for more posts!