He saw action in the Korean War, flying the Grumman F9F Panther from the aircraft carrier USS Essex. He became a midshipman in 1949 and a naval aviator the following year. A graduate of Purdue University, he studied aeronautical engineering his college tuition was paid for by the U.S.
He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor.Īrmstrong was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Draper is part of a team that has proposed a robotic mission called the Inner Solar System Chronology, or Isochron, which would grab five ounces of rock from a younger, smoother part of the moon and whisk it back to Earth, where scientists would determine the age of the sample.įuture robotic explorers may one day accomplish much more on the lunar surface than Armstrong could in 1969 with his space-suited hands holding a sampling stick.īut it took the humanity in that test pilot who moonlighted as a field geologist to pause from his collecting and take in the lunar landscape.Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer, and the first person to walk on the Moon. “That part of the curve is unconstrained. “Which is the correct chronology?” David Draper, NASA’s deputy chief scientist, asked. Scientists have tried to extrapolate the ages of younger regions, but different guesses provide a wide range of age estimates. The dating record still contains a huge two-billion-year gap, from one billion years ago to three billion years ago, because all of the Apollo missions touched down on older swaths of the moon. The calibrated crater counts are now used to determine ages of bodies throughout the inner solar system. Rocks from the other five Apollo landings set the ages of those corresponding regions, which then correlated with the different numbers of craters in each place.
#Who was really the first man on the moon Patch
With the dating of the rocks taken from Apollo 11’s landing site, scientists then knew the age of that patch of the lunar surface. But while planetary scientists could see which places were older and which were younger, they did not know exactly how old any of them were. Thus, a heavily cratered surface is older than a smooth one. But a layer of ice or lava can erase the craters and reset the clock. Over time, impacts of asteroids, big and small, pocked the surface of the moon and elsewhere. Schmitt said.Īnother far-reaching scientific legacy of the moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts is how scientists used them to calibrate a technique of using craters to determine the ages of places in the solar system. “It told us there were going to be tremendous amounts of potential resources for use in space, and possibly even on Earth,” Dr. A light version of helium, helium-3, is of particular future interest as fuel for fusion reactors, which could generate bountiful, nearly clean energy by combining atoms. Armstrong’s soil also contained hydrogen, helium, nitrogen and carbon, much of which had been deposited by the solar wind, the stream of high-speed particles continually flying outward from the sun.