Dava Sobel Visits the Lunar Sample Facility
Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel is an award-winning writer and former New York Times science reporter who have contributed articles to Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker. She has also been a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine, writing about scientific research and the history of science.
Ms. Sobel has maintained an interest in Galileo since childhood and her latest book, Galileo's Daughter, fulfills her ambition to plumb the renaissance scientist's life and times, and to reveal his relationship with his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, a Poor Clare nun. In researching this book, she traveled to Italy four times and translated original documents, including more than 120 letters from Suor Maria Celeste to her famed father.
Ms. Sobel’s book Longitude (published by Walker & Company) became an international best-seller, and has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. Longitude has won several awards, including the “Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, “Book of the Year” in England, “Le Prix Faubert du Coton” in France, and “Il Premio del Mare Circeo” in Italy. Also in recognition of Longitude, Ms. Sobel was made a fellow of the American Geographical Society. The PBS program NOVA produced “Lost At Sea—The Search for Longitude”, a television documentary adaptation of Longitude, which aired in fall 1998, Galileo’s Daughter. In summer 2000 the A&E Network will broadcast a four-hour miniseries dramatization of Longitude produced as a joint production of Granada Films and A&E and starring, among others, Jeremy Irons.
Lecture engagements have taken Ms. Sobel to speak at The Smithsonian Institution, The Explorers Club, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Los Angeles Public Library, The New York Public Library, The Royal Geographical Society (London), and BookExpo America 1998. She has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including NPR’s “All Things Considered”, “Fresh Air”, and “The Connection” with Christopher Lydon, as well as C–SPAN’s “Booknotes”, “The Today Show”, and “ABC World News Tonight”. (Article from www.galileosdaughter.com/home)
Relics from the Moon, still good as new
by Dava on September 27, 2011
While in Houston last week to lecture for the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s “Cosmic Explorations” series, my hosts took me to the nearby Johnson Space Center on a thrill ride — a tour of the Lunar Curatorial Lab, where the rocks the Apollo astronauts collected on the Moon now reside.
Dava with Gary Lofgren, Andrea Mosie and pieces of the Moon
By coincidence, I’d received a message immediately upon arrival in Houston from my friend Carolyn, the only person of my acquaintance ever to have eaten real Moon dust. The memory of that incident had been on my mind the whole day, and now here she was in a rare communication, writing to say she’d just located the astronomer who gave her that Moon dust as a love token four decades ago.
There was no Moon dust lying around the Lunar Curatorial Lab. It was a clean room in the technical sense — so clean that I had to remove my jewelry before entering lest stray atoms of gold contaminate the environment. Obeying regulations, I put on a protective cap and suit (for the protection of the lunar samples) and stood several minutes in an air shower designed to relieve me of Earthly dust particles.
Within the facility’s work area, Moon rocks lay untouchable inside glass cabinets giving them temporary shelter plus an atmosphere of pure nitrogen gas. Even Andrea Mosie, who has worked here for thirty-six years, handling Moon rocks on a daily basis, has never felt the Moon on her skin. She must put her hands in white fabric gloves first, then into the bulky black appendages of the glove boxes, then don clear Teflon gloves as a third barrier before picking up a hammer or chisel to break off small samples for the scientists who request them.
Only half a dozen rocks occupied the various cabinets. The rest — approximately 800 pounds’ worth — hid in the adjacent vault, protected by a system of combination locks worthy of the secret service.
Cosmochemist Gary Lofgren, who holds the singular title of “Lunar Curator”, gave me a glimpse of a Moon rock through a modified microscope set atop one of the glass cases. The rock sparkled at me, flashing tiny beams from a hundred shiny inclusions. I must have gasped, startled by the unexpected show of beauty. “They’re still fresh,” Dr. Lofgren explained, with an equally fresh enthusiasm for the specimens. “Ancient as they are, they never weathered on the Moon’s surface, and they’re protected from weathering here.”
Thanks to all my new friends in Houston for this privilege. (Article from Lunar List Server/C. Neal)