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Tag archives: Apollo missions
Preserving Apollo’s data legacy
Astronaut Alan L Bean collects some lunar soil on the Apollo 12 mission. (Courtesy: NASA)
By Louise Mayor in San Francisco
Day two of AGU Fall 2015 saw the likes of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and NSF director France Córdova talking in rooms packed full of earth and space scientists. But what grabbed my attention was a short talk by Nancy Todd of NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office.
NASA being NASA, I assumed that all its data from completed missions would by now have been digitized and made accessible. That, I learned, is not true – but Todd and her colleagues are on the case.
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Pushing towards the human–Martian frontier
Eye on the sky: NASA astronaut Walter Cunningham during the Apollo 7 mission, in October 1968. (Courtesy: NASA)
By Tamela Maciel at the National Space Centre in Leicester
Last week, the planet Mars was under the international spotlight once more as NASA scientists announced that liquid water may still be flowing on the surface of the red planet. Also, the much-anticipated film adaptation of The Martian – a 2011 novel by American author Andy Weir – a science-driven story of human survival on Mars, hit the box office. Mars was also the hot topic at a recent event held at the National Space Centre in Leicester. The guest of honour was Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham and throughout the hour-long Q&A, he emphasized the need to push the “next frontier” and send humans to Mars.
Cunningham is not a man lacking in confidence or the experience of pushing boundaries. When asked if he ever felt the pressure of the astronaut selection or training process, he said “I thought I could fly anything, any time, anywhere. Was that true? I don’t know. But that’s how I felt.”
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