Remembering the man who sold the moon: Paul Spudis
By Mark R. Whittington, opinion contributor — 09/08/18 02:00 PM EDT If, as many hope, President Donald Trump’s push to return Americans to the moon comes to fruition, the NASA portion of the Lunar Base will be named the Paul Spudis Lunar Science Center if there is any justice. If any one person can be said to have caused America to once again, for the third time in a generation, set out for the moon, it is Dr. Paul Spudis, who recently died suddenly from complications of lung cancer.
Spudis liked to tell the story about how the flight of Apollo 15 inspired him to change his major from engineering to lunar geology. Apollo 15 was the first mission to the moon that seriously sought to do geological science. The astronauts were trained in field geology by Leon Silver and Farouk El Baz, two eminent scientists. Dave Scott and Jim Irwin put the training to good use with the lunar rover, taking samples from the Lunar Apennines and the volcanic Hadley Rill. Meanwhile, in the orbiting command module, Al Worden studied the moon remotely.
Spudis specialized in the search for water on the moon, a matter of great importance for future explorers. When the Apollo missions occurred, the moon was thought to have been bone dry. However, the Clementine mission in the early 1990s, on which Paul Spudis was deputy leader of the science team, found the first indications of ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles. Spudis went on to be the principle investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment for the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter as well as the Mini-RF on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Both experiments showed further indications of water in the shadowed regions of the lunar poles. Recently, based on the findings of the Chandrayaan-1, scientists announced that ice exists just below the lunar surface at the poles beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/405702-remembering-the-man-who-sold-the-moon-paul-spudis
