Curator's Comments Jim Gooding NASA/JSC

Moon Rocks, Mars Rocks, and the Court of Public Opinion

I recently enjoyed refreshing my awareness of what planetary rocks mean to the lay public using a substantial sample of Houston, Texas, as my teachers. My opportunity came when I served as a NASA exhibitor for the Education and Career Day, on February 15, 1997, sponsored by the Houston Hispanic Forum, at the George R. Brown Convention Center. In that role, I talked all day with some of the 13,000 intermediate and high school students, along with their families and mentors, using as conversation pieces an Apollo 15 regolith breccia, and a chunk of Martian meteorite EETA79001 - each separately protected in a standard display container. The teenage students were too young to know about Project Apollo, except from history lessons, although many of them remembered recent publicity about the life-on-Mars debate involving Martian meteorites. I can summarize my experiences (and thoughts) from that day as follows:

Just as many people were interested in the Moon rock as the Mars rock. (I perceived a general fascination that fellow human beings collected the Moon rock at substantial risk whereas the Mars rock fell to Earth for free. The risks taken by the Antarctic meteorite search teams seemed not to register at the same scale as those of the Apollo astronauts.)

Everyone who bothered to talk about rocks wanted to know exactly why we believed the Mars meteorite was from Mars. (These very intelligent people were not prepared to simply "take our word for it" because we think we are big-time scientists. They wanted to know why we thought we knew what we claim to know. And some of the probing questions were as sharp as I have encountered anywhere.)

Some people believed incorrectly that we already had been to Mars to collect samples. (Apparently, some of our computer-generated art work of imaginary future missions is difficult to tell from photographs of reality. We must be smarter in using our tools if we want to successfully communicate with the public.)

No one expressed any fear about the presence of Martian rocks on Earth. (I was pleasantly surprised to find that nearly everyone immediately recognized that our display cases were meant to protect the rocks - not the people. This is in contrast to the "Andromeda Strain" mentality that some of us tend to assume with regard to public reaction about Mars sample-return missions.)

Many people wanted to know when we would return to the Moon and when we would send people to Mars. (No one expressed the opinion that space exploration was a waste of money or time. Maybe I got a little lucky on this point; certainly, I have encountered our critics elsewhere.)

My experience was a valuable one that I would like to renew more often. And I encourage every Principal Investigator or sample researcher to do likewise. Only by finding out what our public customers really think about our work will we have a better appreciation of what our work is truly worth.