Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman visited the Lunar and Planetary Lab, including the HiRISE Operations Center, today. He’s a former Tucson resident and is giving the 2008 commencement address for the University of Arizona. The Apollo 8 crew were effectively our first interplanetary travelers (as the Earth-Moon system can be called a double planet); the first humans to travel far from the Earth and orbit another world. Their evocative pictures and descriptions of Earth as the only colorful object in the vastness of space they beheld have mesmerized people for 40 years, an anecdote that Mr. Borman recounted today. Their Christmas Eve broadcast in 1968 capped off the most tumultuous year in modern American history (elegantly reconstructed in the episode 1968 in Tom Hank’s From the Earth to the Moon).

Our P.I. gave him an overview of the Mars program, showed slides of HiRISE and also current or upcoming lunar missions. Not surprisingly, the engineering issues interested him; in particular aerobraking, heatshields, planetary protection, and the LCROSS lunar impact experiment. He mentioned how they had some doubt whether their heatshield would work (it was first capsule to come back at interplanetary speeds of around 25,000 mph). He contrasted planetary protection in the Apollo days with the great lengths we go to to remove most microbes from Mars-bound spacecraft; for the Moon landings people were more concerned about what might come back! But LCROSS will deliberately send an upper-stage into an impact trajectory; something he noted that Apollo specifically avoided by sending it on a solar trajectory.

I hope it doesn’t sound too cliché, but it was an honor to meet a real American hero! I think all of us here are real space geeks and considered it a great privilege to meet him.

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