Baerbel and Ivo Lucchitta

Intro:

Baerbel and Ivo Lucchitta both worked on the preparation of the Apollo 17 mission in two different ways: while Baerbel produced a detailed geologic map of the landing site, Ivo trained the astronauts and prepared geologic training materials for the data package the astronauts used on the Moon. Later, Ivo worked on the geologic mapping of the Grand Canyon while Baerbel mapped the Moon, and then Mars. They were asked about the evolution of planetary geologic mapping techniques.

Ivo:

Well anyway, look, I really do think it would be best if I gave you a little bit of background about the USGS and everything else. So, in the early 60s, the US was way behind Russia with space, okay? Way behind. And that is when Kennedy said, "Well, let's go to the Moon." Initially, NASA wanted only to go to the Moon, plant the flag, and basically, that's all it was. But there was a very interesting person, a very smart person with the US Geological Survey by the name of Gene Shoemaker. And so he said to NASA, "Do you really think that we should go for the first time ever to another planet and step foot on it and not do any science at all?" And NASA was, mmmm, but eventually they said, "Okay, let's do some geology." Shoemaker at that point founded the US Geological Survey branch here. It was part of the USGS as a whole.

Baerbel:

Astrogeology. 

Ivo:

Yeah, Astro, but the task of the US Geological Survey is to do terrestrial mapping, not planetary mapping, but he talked them into that. A very smart guy. There were two subdivisions. We called them branches in those days. Astrogeologic Studies and Surface Planetary Exploration. That's where I was. So, they made maps, they studied craters, they did the science. The other branch, SPE for short, was tasked with making it possible for the astronauts to do geology on the Moon. That was our job. And we did that in many different ways, developing tools, developing procedures, developing ways of astronauts communicating to people who could not see what they were talking about. And part of that mission was also to make some crater fields. Two: one in Flagstaff and one down in the Verde Valley. They were used by the astronauts to train in a terrain like the one they would be seeing on the Moon. Cinder Lake is one of them and the bigger and better one, which the astronauts liked much better, was down in the Verde Valley. Okay? And it is almost completely obliterated now. Nobody's taken any care of it.

Baerbel:

And very few people know about that one. I don't know why, because it was used for astronaut training just like the one up here, but people forgot about it, probably because it's down there. It's all grown over now, you can't tell where the craters are anymore, hardly at all, so it's just forgotten. But there was actually another training ground that was another crater field. 

Ivo:

Much better than Cinder Lake. Much better. Bigger and better and it was actually a replica of one of the landing sites on the Moon. So, I mean that's basically the subdivision of the branches. Before the missions, we, my branch SPE, had the task of training the astronauts in geology. Not necessarily specific geology. Just general geology. And because of that -, somebody like me trained all the astronauts. Every one of them. The Apollo astronauts. Now, initially, the astronauts were not very enthusiastic about this business. You know, they're aeronautical engineers, they are jet pilots and things like that. And they said, "Oh, gosh, this is a pain in the neck that we have to also do this in addition to the very difficult learning how to maneuver and what have you." But they were taken on a field trip down into the Grand Canyon, way back at the beginning, and that's when they decided, yeah, maybe geology is interesting after all. And from that point on, many of them became quite interested. Not all, but many of them did. 

Hargitai:

Was it noticeable when they were up there that they had this training?

Ivo:

Oh gosh yes. For example, one of the things that I was involved in quite a bit, we did a lot of tests here, where some geologists were sitting in a trailer- without being able to see outside, and then there was a field person running around describing the geology. And it's because of that that we quickly realized we need some method for describing. And the method was basically to start with the big, the general, and focus down on the detail. So, there's always a context.

Baerbel:

You know, people don't think about that, but describing a scene in geology, you can't just start in and make it intelligible. So, this is something that they actually have to learn. You have to train people how to describe geology. Especially people that don't know geology at all.

Hargitai:

You have to teach first the vocabulary of geology and then what to learn to see, the right things.

Ivo:

Correct. Absolutely.

Baerbel:

And then how to describe it. 

Ivo:

Right. And the tools were mostly designed by us, and the interesting thing is, I'm sure you saw the rover displayed in astro? Well, we in Flagstaff made the first version of that. And the astronauts were going around here having a great time piloting that thing. And the one that eventually went to the Moon was really very similar to this one, except electric. So there was a lot of work that was done here for the missions on the Moon.

Hargitai:

Did you also teach them how to read a map, geologic map?

Ivo:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. How to read and to some extent even how to make, but mostly read, yeah, because you know we gave them not map-maps, but photo maps of the crater fields, for example, and they had to locate themselves and do all these kinds of things. And describe where they were. They could be anywhere on this thing, and they had to say, "Okay, we are here," and describe it somehow.

Baerbel:

They didn't really make a map, because they were out there doing their field work. They weren't making a map, no.

Hargitai:

Yes, I've heard that they had to describe with their voice their surrounding and that was the oral map they made, sort of.

Ivo:

Yeah, yeah. No, they were not making, I mean, they were not making a map on the Moon, no.

Baerbel:

That is where you had the backroom researchers in Houston. You know, those were the people that, to some extent, were like Ivo, they were training them. Other people were making the maps. That is where I was. I was in the other group that was not training the astronauts, but we were making the maps. And people like that were in what they called the backroom in Houston. You did not talk to the astronauts directly. You saw everything and heard everything they said. Right? But then you said, "Okay, now we want them to go there, because we know there is an interesting thing." You had to go through the..

Ivo:

Capcom.

Baerbel:

Capcom. The mission control in Houston. You know, you had to tell them and then they told the astronauts. You did not talk to them directly. There was a pretty strict protocol about this because otherwise the whole thing would have been just blah blah blah. Anybody would start talking. The technical terms, there were not that many, because you are basically describing a bunch of rocks. That's about it.

Ivo:

Or maybe layering, you know, things like that.

Baerbel:

If you saw layering, but you know, seeing layering was not in very many places. I mean to begin with, it was just rocks. They had rocks, they had to describe rocks, and they had to discern which rocks were probably more interesting than other rocks, to pick them up. But they really were not involved in map making.

Ivo:

So, one thing you were asking about, what she was talking about, communicating between the astronauts and the geologists on the ground. One thing that most people have forgotten now or never knew is that we came up with a technique of using court reporters. You know who they are? When there's a process going on, a trial or something like that. Nowadays, I don't think they use them anymore, but in those days, there were these guys who were typing what was being said in a special shorthand kind of a machine, and then that was printed right away, which was quite something in those days, because it was before typical printing machines came about. And that was passed on to the geologists. So, they could actually read; they could hear it, but they could also read it. So that's kind of an interesting idea, that there was... utilizing an existing technology to do something useful when otherwise technology just wasn't there. Copying machines, it just wasn't there. This was a long time ago. (laughs)

Hargitai:

Ah yes. So, there is these two sheets, that's from what's called data package, that's for Apollo 17.

Figure 1 Lucchitta, Ivo: Cartoons, March 5, 1968.; Field Geology Guides for Sinus Medii landing site (manuscript); Early Apollo Investigations: Site II P 2: Features of the Lunar Surface.

Ivo:

I better get my... oh, here we go. Yeah. Yeah, I know that.

Hargitai:

So I wanted to ask, are these small drawings of different geological situations...?

Ivo:

Okay. This is the kind of stuff we did. All right.

Hargitai:

So could you tell about how it was learned that it's needed and what's needed?

Ivo:

Gosh. You're asking me about something that happened so long ago... You know, we realized, as I told you earlier, that you had to explain.... You had to explain to the astronauts, teach them what different kinds of features there would be on the Moon. So, they could then describe them and so on and so forth. And what this did was to give them the important characteristics of each of these features that they should be concerned with and talk about, if they could. That's what this was all about, you know, because they had a lot of things in their head besides geology. You know, when they were on the Moon, they had to worry about surviving and getting around and doing all this kind of stuff. So, this was sort of what we would call a crib sheet. That's what we called them, actually, crib— C-R-I-B. Which is something that you might use if you're a student to cheat. Okay? That's what it's all about. And you know, the nice thing is that by having these crater fields, for example, we were able to actually practice this kind of stuff. And that way, we would find out, oh yeah, we're missing such and such. You know, this type of feature, we're going to add it. And another thing that's interesting, and it has nothing to do with mapping, mind you, but I told you that we geologists would sit for God knows how many tests in the trailer and the field person was out there. And at some point, it became very, very clear to us that we needed television. NASA was not planning on having television on the lunar modules or anything. Eventually, they finally said, okay, you know, they were kind of reluctant to do that. But it's because of that that we saw Armstrong coming down the ladder and stepping on the Moon. Because we did have, finally, a TV.

Hargitai:

So originally the TV was not for the media but for the geologic picture?

Ivo:

It was certainly for the geologists, and eventually the lunar rover had a TV camera on it that could be pointed in different places, and that transmitted directly to NASA.

Hargitai:

How did they use the map and data on the EVAs?

Baerbel:

They had the map with them.

Ivo:

Yeah. I don't know if they did on 11.

Baerbel:

Probably not.

Ivo:

Because later they had the package, you know.

Baerbel:

They had a map package. They actually had a map package with them so that they, , could annotate them or, I don't know what they did with it, but anyway, they knew where they were.

Ivo:

No, they could not annotate.

Baerbel:

They could—no. 

Ivo:

They had no way of annotating

Baerbel:

No, because no, not with being in a spacesuit and having those gloves on. (laughs) You couldn't write. But you could describe. You could talk but you couldn't write. But they had the maps, so they knew in the traverses where they were going, and the traverses were pretty much scripted beforehand. You know, where they were supposed to go was pretty much mapped out beforehand. Now, sometimes they diverged from it, you know, they just saw something over there, and they went there. They were not supposed to. (laughs) But they did, and then they came rushing back, so maybe nobody noticed.

Hargitai:

Nobody could do anything. (all laugh)

Ivo:

Nobody could do anything.

Baerbel:

Nobody could do anything about it. They were going off on their own a little bit, but the basic traverse was all scripted. Ivo of course is the one that was involved in all of this.

Ivo:

Yeah, but I was never in mission control. 

Baerbel:

No, you weren't. You personally were not in mission control, but some of your colleagues were.

Ivo:

Oh yeah. I did not want it.

Baerbel:

You didn't want to go there, so you didn't. He wasn't. I was only involved in Apollo 17. Because I made the map for that. And you know, I was in the other branch, Astrogeologic Studies. The ones that did more of the research, you know, and not so much the logistics of how to get the astronauts there. 

Hargitai:

This is the map that I wanted to ask about.

Baerbel:

It does have the landslide on it, which may be a ray or a landslide, some people are still debating that. 

Hargitai:

After that, there was a post-mission map that was published in '81. Nine years after the mission was— [crosstalk 13:57]

Figure 2 Wolfe EW Freeman VL, Lucchitta BK, Sanchez AG Professional paper 1080, Open file report 77-783 Plate 2, Detailed geologic map of the Apollo 17 landing site 1981, 1972-77 1:25,000

Baerbel:

Well, that is only because the official map, the USGS map, before it is published has to go through a lot of review stages. So, the actual map that I made for Apollo 17 was pretty much finished and available to the astronauts beforehand, but the official publication date from the USGS was much, much later.

Hargitai:

And how can it take nine years?

Baerbel:

Because that's the way the US government works. (laughs)

Ivo:

No but also, you know, remember that when Apollo 17 was over, the whole, looking at the Moon disappeared practically. You know, nobody was interested anymore. And so it took... did not happen. It was not a priority anymore. It's a shame. Also something that is interesting potentially, okay, I've made a lot of geologic maps but terrestrial ones. That was what I did in my life. She did the planetary maps. And there's a big difference in... when you're mapping on Earth, you start out— You have aerial photographs, in our case, okay? And you study those. You do photogeology potentially. You might even make a photogeologic map. But that is a very guessy kind of a thing, because you know, photos don't really tell you what's actually there. So if you're a terrestrial geologist, then you go in the field and actually study things, okay? On the ground. 

Hargitai:

So you have the photo and the photo is not enough and you need to—

Ivo:

Oh it's not nearly enough. Not nearly enough.

Baerbel:

When you say, "You have the photo," you make a map on the photo.

Ivo:

You can do that beforehand. 

Baerbel:

You can do that and in fact, at the time, we did all our preliminary mapping on the photo. Because that's what you see. I mean, you're basically doing photogeology. So you know, you have the photo and you put an overlay over it and you don't draw directly on the photo because you don't want to ruin your photo. (laughs) If you want to change your mind.

Ivo:

Yeah but what I was going to say, the big difference is that in terrestrial geology, then you go and check in the field. In planetary geology, you can't do that. So a photogeologic map is it. It's everything.

Baerbel:

But still, you know, you actually mapped on an overlay. You didn't draw your lines right on the photo.

Ivo:

Oh no.

Baerbel:

You know, you always did an overlay because then you could change your mind and you can make another one. It is easy to draw your contact lines right on the photo, but a lot of these contacts are then published on airbrush maps. You had to transcribe your map from the photo, where you saw a feature in a certain place, to the airbrush map, and the airbrush artist maybe didn't notice that feature. So now where am I going to put my contact? Because a feature I mapped on the photo isn't there. So, then you have to guess.

Ivo:

Guess, do the best you can.

Baerbel:

Do the best you can (laughs) to put it in the right place. And that was particularly true for me, with the north pole map of the Moon that I made. That's just nothing but circles. 

Figure 3 Lucchitta, B.K 1978, 1062 Geologic Map of the North Side of the Moon

Ivo:

Fried egg maps.

Baerbel:

Circle and circle and circle and circle. But I saw them all individually. Each one of those circles, I saw on the photo. I mapped very carefully where the ejecta were, you know, I didn't just make it a crater. I did it all very carefully. Then you come to the airbrush map, and there it's pretty much just a round thing. And then you have to transcribe the real shape. And so that took me a long time because I wanted to get it right. So, I didn't just see circles. They're all, each one is, a specific circle that is actually correct. The ejecta are correct.

Hargitai:

So you mentioned that in terrestrial, you do know that the photogeology is not enough to get the geologic picture.

Baerbel:

Yeah, you have to be in the field.

Hargitai:

But then with the geologic background, how do you evaluate, then, these only-photogeologic maps? So you know that these cannot be correct? Because from the terrestrial experience, you know that those are not correct.

Ivo:

But at least, the astronauts were able to check some part of what you have.

Hargitai:

For the post-mission map. Did you change anything? Or could you use the astronauts' new information to create the post-mission map?

Baerbel:

I think that this map here, this one, for the Apollo 17 area, I made pretty much pre-mission, and I don't think I changed it afterwards. And as I said, it's published in '72. The mission was, the 17 mission was in '71-72, wasn't it?

Hargitai:

Yeah, '72.

Ivo:

'72.

Baerbel:

Yeah, so this is it. Pre-mission, I made this map pre-mission.

Figure 4 Lucchitta, B.K., 1972, 800, Geologic Map of Part of the Taurus-Littrow Region of the Moon - Apollo 17 Pre-Mission Map 50k

Ivo:

Why don't you outline with your finger the area that the astronauts actually looked at? I think that would be interesting.

Baerbel:

Well, I don't know exactly anymore.

Ivo:

Well, roughly.

Baerbel:

But they landed in this area somewhere. In this area, it's smooth. They always landed somewhere where it's smooth, — they went on the traverses to here, and they went to that and from what I recall, there was one crater called Shorty, which was either this one or that one. I don't know. And that is where Jack Schmitt discovered the orange soil…

Ivo:

The orange, very exciting.

Baerbel:

…that he got all excited about. Do you know the story about the orange—

Hargitai:

Yeah, yeah, they thought it's a volcanic something.

Baerbel:

Yeah, right, right. And I was very happy because I had actually predicted that they would find volcanic stuff, because in the area there was a big blanket of dark material, which seemed to be on top. Actually, it was not the youngest. It was the upper-most layer, but it was basically just lunar regolith. And it was a very thick lunar regolith that was actually quite old, but it was very thick, so a lot of the craters that were in it were degraded. They went away. So, it looked like it had a lot fewer craters than there actually were originally. So, I thought it was relatively young and it actually turned out to be a very old surface, but then at that time, we still didn't know that all of the lunar surfaces were very old. You know, we were still going under the assumption that maybe some of them are quite young. We didn't know that.

Ivo:

Wait a minute, on Apollo 17?

Baerbel:

Apollo 17. I mean, the Apollo missions came bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Ivo:

Yeah of course.

Baerbel:

You know, there was one after the other. So, you found out from the rock samples, of course, that things were quite old.

Ivo:

The Moon is very old.

Hargitai:

Did you use crater counting at that time?

Baerbel:

Oh yes, I did. I did. In fact, I published a paper about that. Later. That one I published afterwards, sort of excusing myself for the fact that I thought these surfaces were young. I pointed out that in this area here were lots of craters, and that is where the blanket, the regolith, was not as thick as it was over there. In the area here, where you had quite a bit fewer craters, it was because the regolith was very thick and craters had degraded. They had gone away with time. But this is only in hindsight, afterwards, that we realized that, you know? When we had a lot better data. Before that, I didn't know that. So I thought there was a dark mantle, as we called it. We figured it's a surface layer that is relatively young. That was not true. It was old regolith.

Hargitai:

But that it's old could be only said from radiometric dating and not from stratigraphic analysis.

Baerbel:

Yes, that is, well, you've...

Ivo:

Crater counting.

Baerbel:

From crater counting.

Ivo:

Nowadays.

Baerbel:

Crater counting is something that is basically how you date the surfaces on other planets. It's older, there's more craters, you know, the younger, the fewer craters. [crosstalk 22:17]

Ivo:

Yeah. Unless you had this phenomenon...

Baerbel:

But it's also the freshness of the craters, you know, how fresh are they?

Hargitai:

Yeah, the morphology.

Baerbel:

You know, by the morphology of the craters. And so you have to take into account all of these things. The crater counts and the freshness of the craters. But we did not know absolute ages until we got the rocks back, obviously. And then we realized that practically all the surfaces were very old. Some were younger than others, of course. But by and large, they were very old.

Hargitai:

So before the Apollo missions, how old you thought the lunar surface in general were?

Baerbel:

Oh, I don't remember, but...

Ivo:

Well, nobody thought it was as old as it turned out to be. The Moon.

Baerbel:

They were basically around 3.8 billion, and people didn't think that they were anything like it. Maybe one, maybe two, I don't know. Maybe not even that, because some of the dark mantles, they looked like very young volcanic deposits, so people thought maybe the Moon is still active. 

Ivo:

Yeah. But now there's another technique that gives you relative ages, even though you don't know the absolute age. Because if you have the ejecta from one crater overlying another crater, obviously the one that overlies is younger. So, you can work out relative age, but you have no idea how old it really is. But you know, that also brings up another thing, which is, to begin with, we did not know. We, everybody, did not know whether the lunar features were volcanic or impact, and that's why we did a lot of studies of the two kinds. And that's why the Center is here, because you know, you have a lot of volcanic features here and you have Meteor Crater. So the astronauts could go there and say, okay, if it's an impact, you're going to see this and this and this and this and this. If on the other hand, it's a volcanic feature, you're going to see different things. So, they had models in their mind, but —you know, pretty soon it became clear that everything was impact on the Moon. With a lot of volcanic materials filling the basins, but are there any volcanic craters?

Baerbel:

No. There are some.

Ivo:

Are there? Okay.

Baerbel:

There are eruptive centers, some of them where the rilles are, you know the lunar rilles, they have eruptive centers. And they often had continuous crater-like features , and those were probably volcanic. To some extent, they were collapse craters, but some of them were volcanic, and there were dark mantles. So, like for instance, the orange glass that Jack Schmitt found is a volcanic deposit. It's a pyroclastic deposit. It was fire fountains that spewed out stuff. They spewed out the molten lava, of course, but it all disintegrated into tiny little bubbles. Into just tiny little glass beads, so the surface was pretty much covered in these little glass beads. And these are actually volcanic features. These glass beads were all volcanic. They were not impact. They debated about it, even after the samples were brought back. Are these glass beads impact-generated or are they volcanic? And it was a big school of thought that they were impact, and I don't know whether they still do believe this or not.

Ivo:

Well, Jack Schmitt was pretty convinced it was volcanic.

Baerbel:

Well yeah, he was absolutely convinced that it was volcanic and so was I, because I mapped the area, and even though there was no volcano in the area, it looked like there was a surface feature that was plastered on top uniformly. And you know, from impacts, you wouldn't get that much of a uniform area. So the dark and orange materials were analyzed eventually as being volcanic.

Hargitai:

So did that, that can be considered the success of the geologic mapping, because it predicted something that was found.

Baerbel:

To some extent, yes. 

Hargitai:

That's interesting.

Baerbel:

And I had seen orange. I had not seen orange in that map area, but I looked into another area, also on the rim. Apollo 17 is on the rim of Serenitatis, you know, one of the great, big basins. And on the other side of the Serenitatis basin, on the west side of Serenitatis, there was another very dark area that looked just like the dark area in the Apollo 17 area, right? And that dark area had a lot of small impact craters in it, like everywhere on the Moon, and these impact craters threw out orange stuff. And so they were surrounded by little orange ejecta.

Hargitai:

But you observed it?

Baerbel:

I observed that, I observed that.

Hargitai:

In Lowell Observatory?

Baerbel:

No, no, I observed all of that on the pictures we had. We had color pictures. This was Apollo 17, right? The previous missions that were in equatorial orbit, they took pictures, and when I made this map, you know, I had access to these pictures. And these pictures, they were photographs. They showed that these little craters had orange stuff around them. And I did not think that they were volcanic craters, I thought they were drilling down into an orange layer. I thought, that there is a volcanic layer there, which makes the orange. That is why I was so happy when Jack Schmitt found the orange at the Apollo 17 site. Because I had seen it somewhere else, but I had not seen it in that area. I lucked into the correct interpretation.

Ivo:

The photos were taken with the Hasselblad, right?

Baerbel:

Yeah.

Ivo:

That's what they had on the missions, Hasselblad.

Hargitai:

Cameras.

Baerbel:

Yeah, and then, of course, those they brought back. A lot of these pictures, the astronauts brought back. But—

Ivo:

They brought back the film.

Baerbel:

But then because the earlier pictures— (audio break)—Lunar Orbiter 4, is that what it's called? Yeah, Lunar Orbiter 4, all right? Those were all sent back by cutting the pictures up into stripes and then they were reassembled on earth. After that, they had the astronauts, who took real pictures. And those they actually brought back, they weren't just sent cut into stripes and stuff like that. But the Orbiter 4 images were still good enough to draw my north pole circles, even though they were pretty bad. (laughs) But there were much, much better pictures, as we were mapping along for the landing site of Apollo 17. As I said, it's the last mission. We got a lot more data. I mean, the data were coming in as I was mapping, the stuff was coming in. And I had very good pictures, not just Orbiter 4 pictures, like the metric camera pictures and the panoramic pictures. It’s slowly coming back to me. These were those big, long strips, and they had very high resolution. It was on the order of a meter or less even.

Ivo:

Already?

Baerbel:

Yeah, at that time.

Hargitai:

That was analog film.

Baerbel:

That was in analog. Those were actual photographs.

Ivo:

Photographs.

Baerbel:

And they were these big, long strips, and they were in stereo, you know, so you could see things in stereo. I remember we had pretty fancy technology for making maps.

Ivo:

Stereoplotters.

Baerbel:

The people used stereoplotters, to make maps. Not the geologic maps like I did. But they made real maps of the Moon, and...

Hargitai:

Contour lines.

Baerbel:

The contour lines, right. And it was kind of fun. to look at one of these stereo images, which they used to make the contour maps in these big, big photogrammetry machines, right? In order to make the stereo maps, they used a little red dot, which one had to set on the ground. The dot was floating in the stereo picture, right? The operators were very skilled. I could never do that. They made this dot, little red dot, sit on the surface, and then they kept that dot at the same elevation and moved it along on the ground. They moved that dot along, and as they did that, it made the contour. 

Ivo:

It made a contour line.

Baerbel:

I could never do that well enough, but I looked at those pictures, and it was a lot of fun because it's like flying over the area with the dot. You were submerged in that valley that you looked at. You were in there. And you're cruising around, you know? You could go wherever you wanted to go. You were cruising around, you're cruising around contour lines or you could go higher or lower and down and up. It was really fun.

Ivo:

Yeah, but none of that happened during the Apollo missions, though. 

Baerbel:

Yes.

Ivo:

Oh really?

Baerbel:

Yes.

Ivo:

In which Apollo?

Baerbel:

In order to make this map, I used that technique.

Ivo:

But there are no contours on that map.

Baerbel:

No, no, no, but I used the machines that made the contours. I did not map with that machine, I did not map with that machine.. I just looked to see what's there. I just had a little fun..

Ivo:

Yeah but what I was asking you, whether they were making contour maps [crosstalk 31:44]. Sure, sure.

Hargitai:

So they did make a lot of...

Baerbel:

They made a lot of maps, yes. They made contour maps because I know the whole purpose of moving that little red dot around is to make a contour map.

Ivo:

Of course.

Baerbel:

And then, no, they had contour maps, I know. It's because I wrote a paper on that ridge that goes through the landing site valley. You know, there's that ridge? I don't know if you're aware of it.

Hargitai:

No.

Baerbel:

These Mare ridges are actually little faults. Wrinkle ridges. They are faults, you know? And most people think they are thrust faults, There's one of them in the area, and where it hits the highlands, it's starts going up and down across the highlands. The ridge does. And in the highlands , it wasn't a wrinkle ridge anymore, it became a scarp. So, I knew that these were actually faults with displacement, . And the scarp went up and down in the highlands and from that you could measure the attitude of the fault, It’s triangulation. You know that the fault is a plane. And you could map that plane by how it intersects the topography. (laughs) Are you with me? Sort of?

Hargitai:

That's hard geology, yes.

Baerbel:

That's hard geology, anyway. On Mars, there's an area that I have mapped and unfortunately didn't get finished. It’s of an area, where we could take two images next to each other, and you could see stereo. These images look like photographs, even though they're digital images.. But what was better is that they actually did have laser-based topography. So you could superimpose the whole image on a topographic map and then, in GIS software, you could move the image around, right? And so, you don't really see stereo, but when you move the image around you see a mountain here…

Ivo:

Perspective.

Baerbel:

…and a valley there, and a scarp there. You're actually seeing 3D, even it's not stereo.. And that is basically what I used to make my map. I looked at everything very carefully in three dimension, in 3D. But it was a totally different technique.

With all of these planetary maps you make, they are based on analog images of the earth. In your mind, you're seeing something that you're comparing with something that you have seen on Earth. You know? And on the Moon, not so much, because we don't have craters like that on earth. But you're always interpreting things with what you know. And what you know is what you know from Earth, so you always have that bias. But you can't do it any other way, really. Now this analog system is much more important on Mars, because there are a lot of Earth-like features. And not so much on the Moon, which is shows mostly craters.

Hargitai:

So this is—

Figure 5 Lucchitta, B.K. 1970 LAC 13 Preliminary Geologic Map of the Aristoteles Quadrangle of the Moon

Figure 6 Lucchitta, B.K. 1972, 1971 725 Geologic Map of the Aristoteles Quadrangle of the Moon

Baerbel:

Yeah, this is the first lunar map I made, isn't it? Yeah, right. I forgot about that.

Hargitai:

And the first version was black and white or what was called "uncolored" and then there was lots of, in some cases, ten different colored, hand-colored versions.

Baerbel:

Yeah, and you know why we made the hand-colored versions?

Hargitai:

No.

Baerbel:

I can tell you exactly why. It's a check. Because when you draw a lot of contacts, which you do on these maps, you have lots and lots and lots of lines. And within these lines, there are different units.. If you just have a mess of lines, you don't know what you're looking at. Of course, you color the units in order to emphasize a different entity So, then your mind can see it better, right?. But the other reason, why we actually physically sit there and color the units? Because when you do that, you have to look at every millimeter of your map as you color it. And then you catch the loose contact. You catch the places where you made mistakes. And that is why we all hand-colored our maps. And then we had a lot of indicator lines that were going to the border of the map that said, you know, this is a missing contact, this is a duplicate contact, this is a gap in the contact, this doesn't have a label. You know? You went through your own map you just made and colored it out because that's the only way that you made sure that you look at everything. Everything. If you just look over the map, and say, " I don't need that. I can just go look for mistakes." You don't catch them. 

Hargitai:

So I made only one geologic map in my life, of Hellas Basin on Mars. And exactly because of this, but in GIS, I think it was called topology, topological check. So the software checked if all the lines are closed. 

Baerbel:

Yeah. Well if the machine does it for you, that's great, but we didn't have that. So (laughs) we had to use our own techniques, and the technique to use at the time was that you colored out the map.

Hargitai:

In some maps, the colors are different, so there was no color standard but you experimented with the right contrasting colors?

Baerbel:

Yeah. You eventually, if you publish it, then you have to follow the scheme that you had. On the Moon, of course, you have the different eras, you know? The Imbrian, the Eratosthenian, and then the Copernican. And the color scheme for the craters was different for these different eras.

Hargitai:

Yeah, green and yellow...

Baerbel:

And also, the background color, I think, was supposed to be within a certain range of these schemes. So, you didn't completely have the freedom. When you published it. you had to follow the scheme. But as long as you're playing around yourself making the map, you could do anything you want, you know? If you liked something bright red, you know, you made it bright red. I think eventually in the map that was published, the Mare Frigoris is bright red, I think.

Hargitai:

Yes, it's at... this small-scale map series has the brightest colors, I think, ever made in a planetary geological map. All the colors are really very bright, with the colors.

Baerbel:

The one that I made?

Hargitai:

Yes.

Baerbel:

Well, I liked it.

Hargitai:

So it's artistically, it's a very special one.

Baerbel:

Yeah, because I liked it that way. Yeah. And I said, you know, up to a point, it was my choice. You had to fit within certain rules, but...

Ivo:

I just wanted to show you how maps were made, whether it was planetary or Earth. In this particular case, here is a map with, the contours, and the geology, okay? Pretty busy. So you would separate them. The contours were made into a green line to separate them from the geology lines. Then you would make prints, Ozalid prints.

Hargitai:

What is the green line?

Ivo:

It was just the same map, but the lines were all green. This is a final product here. This went to the publication.

Hargitai:

And how do you call this paper? Or this print?

Ivo:

Mylar.

Hargitai:

Mylar.

Ivo:

Mylar. Plastic, it's not paper.

Baerbel:

It's plastic, yeah, it's plastic.

Ivo:

You have the green lines—with the contours and the geology, then you make a print, an Ozalid print, and then you'd color. That's what she was talking about. You color that to make sure that you don't have any open contacts or what-have-you. I have a green line, but it doesn't have any of the geology.

Baerbel:

He talks about a green line, and we called it a brown line, because in our planetary maps, they were all brown. They weren't green, they were brown.

Ivo:

You actually, with a rapidograph) pen, with an ink pen, you would draw the geology on the topographic base, okay? And then once you did that, then you could make a print and then you could color the print to check whether it was okay. That's the procedure. Now, it's all digitized. I mean, it's totally different.

Baerbel:

Yeah but we, as I said, we had to handle it all, and on the brown line, you drew the geologic contacts.... you probably know that, you drew it with these ink pens.

Hargitai:

No I don't...

Baerbel:

You don't know it?

Ivo:

You don't know them? I'll show you some.

Hargitai:

I've only seen the papers, not the process, so I've never seen the process.

Ivo:

The green line, or brown line, the purpose for having those colors, it doesn't matter what they were. They wanted to make the Ozalid print, but they wanted it to be a different color from black so that when you as a geologist are drawing your geology, that is black and the contours are either green or brown.

Hargitai:

Because it would become invisible in the print?

Ivo:

Oh no, no.

Baerbel:

No, but you could tell them apart when you're looking at the map. You know, when you're looking at that kind of map on the mylar, you could tell them apart.

Ivo:

When you're drawing the geology on this thing, you could say, "Okay, this is my line, black, and here's the contour, brown or green." 

Hargitai:

And then when you colored it, and then you noticed that there's some problem, and then you correct it.

Ivo:

Then you go back to the...

Baerbel:

Back to that.

Hargitai:

So there was only one single original, where you deleted or erased the contour lines?

Baerbel:

Yeah, you erase the contact lines. I've done a lot of erasing. A lot of erasing. You have a very sharp knife.

Ivo:

That's the reason for using mylar.

Baerbel:

It's just, you can erase it. And I've done a lot of erasing. And then of course, eventually, you get the real cartographer guys. You give them your brown line that you, that I made. But of course, I'm not a good draftsman at all, so my contacts, even if they are good contacts, they're pretty wiggly [crosstalk 42:48] they're not smooth.

Ivo:

These are the rapidograph pens.

Baerbel:

That's ink pens that—

Ivo:

That's an ink pen.

Baerbel:

They're like the old fountain pens, except they're for real ink. [crosstalk 43:00]

Ivo:

Very carefully calibrated widths.

Baerbel:

For the black drafting ink. And not for the writing ink. They're special pens for drafting.

Ivo:

German. Rapidograph.

Baerbel:

For drafting. [crosstalk 43:14] That's the name of this, they're like fountain pens, they have ink inside them.

Ivo:

RA-PI-DO-GRAPH.

Hargitai:

Rapidograph.

Ivo:

That's a particular variety. These are quite old.

Baerbel:

They have a little ink cartridge on the inside. You make your lines the best you can, right? And then you give it to the draftsmen and they see your drawing, and they probably also have all the underlying pictures and everything. But they redraw your lines so they look good.

Hargitai:

That's going to be printed.

Baerbel:

And that is what gets published eventually. Not the little scribbly lines that I put on there, because they're not good enough.

Ivo:

Yeah. Well, what they would do is, if she had wiggles that were not meant to be there, they would smooth the wiggles.

Baerbel:

Yeah, they'd make smooth lines where I intended it to be smooth but it didn't look like that.

Hargitai:

Yeah, that's another interpretation they had to interpret. Well, what your intention was.

Baerbel:

Yes, they do, but they were pretty good at it. And it, at the scale, you know, it's all a matter of scale. It didn't really matter that much whether the tiny little wiggles were smoothed out, because that tiny little wiggle doesn't probably mean anything at the scale of the map.

Ivo:

So, it was very slow and very careful work. You know, now it's all digitized of course, and if you make a mistake, you just go back and redo it. I mean, that little segment of line, you can correct it. But in this case, you could only correct it by erasing. 

Baerbel:

Yeah.

Hargitai:

This is your Mars...

Figure 7 Lucchitta, B.K. 1978, 1065, Geologic Map of the Ismenius Lacus Quadrangle of Mars

Baerbel:

Yeah, I made that one. I think that was my first Mars map. Yeah.

Hargitai:

Mmmhmm. So how different mapping Mars was compared to mapping the Moon?

Baerbel:

A hell of a lot more fun. (laughs)

Ivo:

It's more interesting than the Moon. [crosstalk 44:56]

Baerbel:

Because there's geology on there. There's something to look at.

Hargitai:

Okay.

Baerbel:

In this area, which is the northern edge of the highlands, of the Mars highlands, where you get into the northern plains, you have all these little outliers, you know, these little mesas. And so, there was actually something to interpret. There was some geology that you could look at and say, because I see this, it's probably that, etc etc. And I published a paper. This is called fretted terrain, all of these little outlying mesas, they are called fretted terrain for some reason. And yeah, that was my first Mars map, and I liked making it because, for the first time, you could actually really see geology in action, like this highland scarp is disintegrating, right? And then it is being invaded by probably some lavas or something that came from the north and flowed into these areas. And you could see a lot of stuff that was ice-related, and that is when I started to realize that there was a lot of ice on Mars. And I did that before a lot of other people did. And I published quite a bit on ice on Mars. And everybody thought I was nuts. (laughs)

Ivo:

You are nuts.

Baerbel:

I was nuts. Because they said, "Ice on Mars? It doesn't have an atmosphere, how the hell would you get ice on Mars? Forget it. You're wrong." I'm not kidding. I had a hard time. But I was right, now we know I was right.

Hargitai:

I know that those papers are really, has a high number of citations today.

Baerbel:

Yeah.

Hargitai:

That you wrote about that.

Baerbel:

Yeah, yeah, but at the time, everybody thought I was just crazy, yeah. But I could tell, you know, I could tell that the valleys that came out of the highlands going into the lowlands, had these grooves in them, you know? Like stuff was flowing. And so, I knew there was something flowing away from the highlands. So, I interpreted it as being loaded with ice that lubricates it, so you have basically glacier-type, not real glaciers, but glacier-type structures.

Hargitai:

And you used Mariner images for this map?

Baerbel:

Yes.

Hargitai:

And was it—

Baerbel:

Mariner 9. Mariner 9 was the one that had global coverage, but it was not very high resolution. And they had a few postage stamps here and there of very high resolution. But most of it was not very high resolution, but it was good enough for me to see the geology, to actually see geology that you could interpret.

Hargitai:

That's another one from your Mars... That's '99, the...

Figure 8 Lucchitta, B.K., 1999, 2568, Geologic Map of Ophir and Central Candor Chasmata (MTM -05072) of Mars

Baerbel:

Oh this is the Valles Marineris, the first one I published there. Yeah. 

Hargitai:

Were there any surprises or unexpected findings that you found during the mapping and not just taking, looking at pictures independent of it? So how much exploratory geologic mapping is on this?

Baerbel:

Oh, very much so on Mars. Yeah, do you know the fact that all these things that are blue in here are stacks of layers? In geologic deposits? And how the hell would you get those? You know, were they put down in water or just by the wind? I think we still don't know for sure. We still don't know. Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun because you're looking at a different world, and you start to interpret what's there, you know, nobody else has ever seen it. It's fun. It was a lot of fun, yeah. I mean, almost anything that I did, it's a new discovery, you know? Something that other people haven't thought of. 

Hargitai:

So the geologic mapping is a method of discovery?

Baerbel:

Yes, to me, it is. Absolutely. And on Earth too.

Ivo:

Well not just discovery, but documentation. This is how things are. 

Baerbel:

Well, that is the number one thing, and that is something that I should probably emphasize too. You know of course of Don Wilhelms? You know, he's the guy that basically invented the methodology for planetary mapping, right? On the Moon. Don Wilhelms is the one that set the stage on how you map on other planets. He has a book about it. And he emphasized something very much which we had to adhere to. Almost an orthodox kind of a thing. When you are labeling something, a unit, and describing it, you are supposed to stick to what you see You do not interpret when you describe the unit or give it a name. At the time you give it a name, you don't interpret, you just describe. Then in the map explanation, , you have a little section that says, "Interpretation." And then you can go wild. You can say anything you want. You know, it doesn't matter what you say, within reason. But you separate fact from fiction, and that was very, very important to the first mappers, to keep it that way, because we all knew that we could see very little of what was really there.

Ivo:

Well, that's standard practice for terrestrial mapping. You describe the unit, you don't invent what you see. You just write down what you have actually seen.

Hargitai:

And this is also what you said to the astronauts, that they should use descriptive words.

Ivo:

Descriptive.

Baerbel:

Yes, descriptive, yes.

Ivo:

As much as possible.

Baerbel:

You're supposed to do the same on Mars, but by now they've gotten away from that method. But when we first saw certain features on Mars, you couldn’t label them a lava flow. Absolute no-no. You know? You have to label it “some kind of a flow feature”, or something that looks like a flow.

Ivo:

Or you see on terrestrial mapping, you certainly can label it a lava flow, because you look at it.

Baerbel:

Well yeah, you have the data.

Ivo:

You crack a piece open, it is a lava. So that's the big difference there right away.

Baerbel:

But on Mars, all you can tell with some certainty, the thing was flowing because you see the flow lobes, but you don't know what it's made out of.

Hargitai:

This is because it's a photo interpretation?

Baerbel:

Yes. Yeah. So, in our mapping, all the time when I was mapping, , it was still a no-no to label something with an interpretation. I think it's a lava flow. You know, that's an interpretation. Now, we have so much better data, especially on Mars. Spectral data and the like, so you are pretty certain about certain features. 

Ivo:

Well plus you have the rovers wandering around and they drill into things.

Baerbel:

And you have the rovers there and then you drill, You haven't had samples back yet, but you have enough information that probably, nowadays, if people call something a lava flow, nobody would get very upset because you're probably right. Even in the description. I don't know, because I haven't mapped recently. I haven't mapped in many years, and there's one map, which is next to this one here, It is a map that I never finished. (laughs) It's the next one over. Over here, yes. So, I'll give it to somebody who's interested to map it. It's fine, they can take whatever I've done and then go on from there. Change it or leave it. 

Ivo:

Something else that might be interesting to you is equipment, not methods. In the Survey we used to have a a building, up there on the mesa, that's gone, which contained the photo lab. Among other things. And they had probably the biggest camera in the— well, for sure in the country, maybe in the world, because the camera was a room. And the lens was in the wall. And that's what they used for making all these great big maps. Otherwise, you would do it in pieces, and that's no good. They did it in one piece. The building is gone. And I wish that it had been preserved, but it's gone. 

Baerbel:

That building is torn down, and so is that room, which was one big camera. 

Hargitai:

That's the original astrogeology building?

Baerbel:

It's not the building 1, it was called building 2.

Ivo:

Building 2.

Baerbel:

Building 1 is where we are now, where building 6 is now. Building 1 was in the same place except a little off-center.

Ivo:

If you're in the parking lot looking at the astro building, that is 6? Okay, building 2 was on the left, where there are some trees or something else now.

Baerbel:

So my office was right there were my office is now, except I looked at the trees from the other side. That building is gone, torn down. Yeah.

Ivo:

It's really interesting to think of a camera being a whole room. (laughs) That was some camera.

Baerbel:

It's kind of hard to envision somehow.

Hargitai:

So the last thing is the Ganymede maps. Part of the Memphis Facula quadrangle.

Figure 9 Lucchitta, B.K., Barnes, C.W. , Glotfelty, M.F. , Inge, 1992, 2289, Geologic Map of the Memphis Facula Quadrangle (Jg-7) of Ganymede

Baerbel:

Oh yeah yeah, that's because these maps are based on the Voyager pictures. And we didn't have the other half of the quadrangle... there were no images there [crosstalk 54:41].

Hargitai:

Again, the question, how different mapping Ganymede is from mapping Mars?

Baerbel:

It was quite different even though you basically did the same thing everywhere. You looked at the pictures, and you interpreted them. But on Mars, things were like on Earth. On Ganymede, they are not like on Earth at all. (laughs) So, you basically went back to mapping what you saw. Just outlining the things you saw. There are all of these grooves [inaudible 55:14] in blue, and then there are those great, big huge circular features, which are all basins, obviously. They're in brown. They are older parts of Ganymede, and they were eaten away by this grooved stuff. This was ice that came up from underneath and ate away at the older material and also covered it. Mapping Ganymede was a lot of fun, too, because at the time, nobody knew what the grooves are. Well, they still don’t really know what the grooved stuff is. This is another example where you discovered something and you interpreted it. It was obvious to me that the grooved stuff was later and was eating into the other material, or covering it up. Partly actually just replacing it. I mean, not necessarily going on top of it, but just eating into it.

Hargitai:

It's melting, it's...

Baerbel:

Basically, not really melting it but coming up from deep down. The ice was coming up from farther down and pushing the surface material to the side or, replacing it.

Hargitai:

So, I collected some names of different people working at USGS airbrushing, contouring, and making photo mosaics. And I would like to ask you to, both of you, to go through this list, because these names are, I just know the names and I know nothing about who they were. I mean that there was a large team working on the maps, but...

Baerbel:

Yeah there was, but—

Hargitai:

Except for the geologic authors, nothing can be known of the other persons.

Ivo:

Unfortunately, yes.

Baerbel:

That is very true, and I can tell you only a few of these because a lot of them worked in different buildings. Like the illustrators. The original campus up there had building 1, which I just told you was right next to where building 6 is now. Then it had building 2, which housed…

Ivo:

Draftsmen and people in photography.

Baerbel:

Building 2 was were a ramada stood later, which is gone now too

Ivo:

Well, that's the building that had the big camera.

Baerbel:

That had a big camera in it. That's also gone. Then there's building 3, which is still there.

Ivo:

3 was terrestrial geology, that's where I was.

Baerbel:

That's still there, that's the building that's right across from the parking lot. That's where Ivo had his office.

Ivo:

Well, it was actually SPE to begin with.

Baerbel:

Yeah.

Ivo:

Surface Planetary Exploration.

Baerbel:

But building 3 is one of the original buildings, that's why it's pretty crappy. (laughs) 

Hargitai:

Yeah, I've heard people didn't really like those buildings.

Baerbel:

No, they were very cheaply built at the time. And no insulation, you know, oof, they were cold.

Ivo:

Windows could not be opened, heat...

Baerbel:

Actually, in building 1 you could open the windows.

Ivo:

1 you could, but not any of the other ones. 

Baerbel:

Yeah. Anyway, the thing is that the illustrators, and also the people who did the digital work and the drafting work, were in a different building from us, and so there were a lot of people we never really knew, If they were some sort of helper types, they were there for half a year or just a couple of months, and then they disappeared.

Ivo:

Yeah, but some were there for a long, long time. (laughs)

Baerbel:

Well, and I—

Ivo:

We also had surveyors, by the way. Because to make the crater fields, which were exact copies of some landing site on the Moon, you needed to survey, where the craters were and what size they were. And then after this was marked, it was really a very interesting process. Then you would put in a charge or an explosive, whose size depended on how big the crater was supposed to be. So, the whole operation was actually very carefully, accurately done.

Hargitai:

I thought she started the digital process.

Hargitai:

[shows photographs]

Baerbel:

That's Larry Soderblom. He is probably one of the most famous astro people we have in Flagstaff. He has been very, very much involved in just about every mission on a higher level. He is not a map maker. He published a bunch of papers, he's one of the brightest people around. Gene Shoemaker said, you know, "If I'd have to be reincarnated, I want to be him." Because he's a really bright guy. And he's still around, but he doesn't come in very much. Larry Soderblom. Frank Shaffer we know also, but he's not around anymore. But he may still be in... Eric Eliason, we know him. Ginny. Ginny Shaber.

Baerbel:

And this is Masursky

Hargitai:

So may I ask if you have any favorite place where you would like to land if you could?

Baerbel:

Valles Marineris on Mars.

Hargitai:

Okay. (laughs)

Baerbel:

(laughs) That's easy. 

Hargitai:

And why is that?

Baerbel:

I've worked on Valles Marineris quite a bit. And there is a lot of geology there. You know, there are all these sedimentary beds. Nobody really understands where they came from. It may have had an ocean. I mean, it may have had a big lake in there, or, it may not have had a big lake. It has outflow channels, big channel-like features at the bottom end that go out of there and then eventually merge with other channels. They started in the Valles Marineris. I'm not sure I know much about ice features in the Valles Marineris. Ice features are what I was really into early on in my Mars studies, because I saw ice features everywhere. But then I got interested in the Valles Marineris, and you don’t see obvious ice features in the Valles Marineris. You do see quite a bit of landslide-like features,. Whether they're lubricated by ice or not, I wouldn't know. They're obviously landslides, there's no doubt about that. I got first interested in Valles Marineris because of the landslides, and I wrote some papers on that. Landslides in the Valles Marineris or something like that. I emphasized again and again and again, you know, that as far as I was concerned, I thought there was water involved in these landslides. Not just dry. They could be dry, but I always saw features that made me think there was water involved.

Hargitai:

Like underwater landslides?

Baerbel:

No, not underwater landslides, but that they were not necessarily dry landslides. They may have been wet. In other words, if there was water in the landslide, which came off the walls, then there was water in the walls. They were lubricated by water. It all goes back to the fact that I thought there was a lot of ice on Mars. Now, everybody thinks that the subsurface has a lot of ice in it. Even in the equatorial area. Then, it was not considered to be true. Nobody believed that there was water, , when I was working on these things. Of course, I believed it because I saw all these features that indicated that there was water involved in the emplacement of the landslides. Also, I saw features in the fretted terrain, that indicated streaming on the valley floors. I always thought that there was some kind of lubrication. . By water or ice. Anyway, the Valles Marineris seems to me to be most interesting, because they had so many Earth-like features in it. It also has a lot of features that look like creep, moving very slowly. Not so much volcanic stuff, even though there also is volcanic material in there. I've published a paper on volcanic features in the Valles Marineris, but a lot of that was wrong. (laughs).

Ivo:

For me, the answer to your question is the Grand Canyon, but I've already landed there. (laughs)

Hargitai:

But it's almost the same.

Baerbel:

It's the Grand Canyon, well, you know. Well, that's another thing about the Valles Marineris. You can see into Mars in three dimension, because you have these huge scarps on the walls, However, most of them are covered up by dust, so you don't really know what's underneath. In the Valles Marineris, at the end, where it goes out towards the outflow channels, people have looked at the walls in great detail. There, it looks like you see outcrops. Some people think that the lower part of the walls there might be crustal material, whereas the upper part of the walls looks more like layers. Later layers. Probably volcanic layers, just like on the Moon, you know?. Basically, the surface of Mars in many places is underlain by plateaus. In the highlands, maybe not so much. The Valles Marineris is cut into one of these plateaus, whose top surface is almost certainly lava. 

Hargitai:

So the other question is, if there were any very difficult mapping project that you made? Much more difficult than the others or their—

Baerbel:

The one that I haven't finished. That's the most difficult I have ever seen.

Hargitai:

This one [crosstalk 1:08:06]?

Baerbel:

And the reason why I want somebody else to finish it. (laughs) I haven't finished it because I cannot understand the area. I can't understand what's going on. 

Hargitai:

But it's also Valles Marineris, right?

Baerbel:

It's also in the Valles Marineris. It's the West Candor Chasma, it's the one next to the one that's published. Well, I said, the one next to it. The one that I'm still "working on," except I will never finish it because I'm not working anymore. And that one is exceedingly complicated because you probably have a lot of earth movement. They have this interior deposit just like they have all over the Valles Marineris, but instead of being an ordinary sequence of layers, it's all over the place. It's probably slid in some places. It's cut in some places. It's faulted in other places. And one of the problems is, the pictures are too good. And you'd be surprised if I say the pictures are too good, because you'd think the better the pictures are, the more you understand.

Ivo:

You get lost in the details.

Baerbel:

And you get lost in the details. The better the pictures are, the less you understand, because it's like seeing the trees and not the woods. You see, it's too much detail and the detail does not fit the big picture because it doesn't seem to make sense. 

Hargitai:

When you can zoom into a digital image, you use very different scales.

Baerbel:

When it is a small scale, it is much easier. Where you don't understand very much, you make up your mind, and you go with it. You run with it. But that part of Valles Marineris is at a large scale, so you see all the complications. I keep changing my mind. I can't make up my mind and it drives me nuts. Because I just don't understand it. If I figure I understand something, I see something else next to it that totally negates my interpretation. It tells me: "No, no, I was wrong in that place. It can't be right."

Ivo:

You need to go there and you would resolve the issue very quickly.

Baerbel:

I need to go there, right. If you see less at smaller scale, you just draw circles around the features you see, and you say, "Oh okay, this is knobby terrain, right? This is striated terrain, right? This one is, collapsed material. Draw it how you see it." You can't do that in that place in the Valles Marineris, because you know it's not correct. (laughs) That is the area on Mars that is the most difficult for me. And that's why I haven't finished it, because I just don't know what to do. 

Hargitai:

How did you get interested in planetary geology, not just—?

Ivo:

It was a job, to begin with.

Baerbel:

Yeah. It wasn't what I was doing at all. I was a normal field geologist. My thesis, you know, my PhD thesis, is on the thrust belt in the Rocky Mountains. It had nothing to do with planetary stuff at all. No, never dreamt of it. Ivo is the one that got the job in...

Ivo:

With the USGS, yeah.

Baerbel:

You know, we both got our PhDs in '66, 1966. And I had a baby. I was fed up studying. I wanted to take a break. Ivo and I finished at the same time, and so he was looking for a job. That was the time when they were doing all the Apollo missions and the USGS was hiring because they needed people to work on the Moon missions. That's why he got the job.

Hargitai:

But he applied specifically for the Apollo missions—

Ivo:

No, no, no. Well, I mean that was the reason for being hired, but—

Baerbel:

Yes, at the time, yes. Yes.

Ivo:

But it's not that I said, "Oh, I want to work on Apollo." No.

Baerbel:

No, but there was a job opportunity, they needed people. We had some of our friends and colleagues from Penn State, where we got our PhDs, already working there. In fact, where's that one picture that shows him?

Ivo:

This guy here was a colleague in graduate school.

Baerbel:

And he got the job.

Ivo:

And he got a job a year before, here.

Baerbel:

Here in Flagstaff. He— [crosstalk 1:12:25]

Ivo:

He said, "Why don't you apply?" and I did and I got the job.

Baerbel:

But he's not alive anymore, he's dead, unfortunately. He was a very nice guy.

Ivo:

Right.

Baerbel:

But anyway, so Ivo got the job and I had a baby. And I didn't want to work. So, we both moved to Flagstaff and I didn't work for a whole year.. For two reasons. I was an illegal alien. (laughs) I overstayed my visa. I couldn't work. I had no visa at all at that point. And the other thing is I had the baby and I was fed up. So, it took about a year, a couple years or so, and I decided I don't like not working. And that's when I applied at the USGS. They knew that I wanted to work there. I didn’t care what I worked on, as long as I got some job. And the only thing that was available, was astrogeology. The Moon at the time. I said, "Fine, I don't care." I started out as a technician, yes, in fact. They needed somebody to run a densitometer machine. (laughs) You know, somebody who scanned images and plotted their density. I don't know what they did it for. I don't even remember. I said, "Okay, I'm available. It's a half time job, and I have the baby, so a half time job's great." And they hired me. So, I worked as a technician for a while, running these machines. And then eventually, I managed to get a visa, so I became an immigrant. It took an act of Congress to change my visa, but they allowed it because I had an American baby. My argument was: On the expiration of my exchange student visa, I had to leave The US for two years. But, I said: "If I leave, my kid is going to go with me. She's an American citizen, she has the right to grow up in America. If you're not letting me stay, she can't stay here either." And so, I got an immigration visa.

Hargitai:

So you were here with the Fulbright?

Baerbel:

I was with a Fulbright grant on an exchange visa. Only for one year. I was an undergrad. I stayed one year and I realized I could get a degree, my undergrad degree, if I stayed another year. The school where I went to was Kent State.

Ivo:

In Ohio.

Baerbel:

In Ohio. That's where I started out. As an exchange student, I was in Ohio. They put me there, I didn't choose it. And then I wanted to stay a second year, as I got an opportunity to teach German in the German department.. They gave me enough money for another year. I didn't have to pay tuition nor room and board. So , I got my undergrad degree. Then, I applied for assistantships to many schools. I got an assistantship at Penn State. I got several offers, but Penn State appealed to me, because there was a professor whom I liked. So I went to Penn State and that's where I met Ivo. And that's where I eventually got my PhD.. I studied structural geology, which involved field geology in the Rocky Mountains. 

Hargitai:

So you were at the same class?

Ivo:

What do you mean by class? Year?

Hargitai:

Your PhD year.

Ivo:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Baerbel:

Yes. We were both... I got there I think in '62. '61?

Ivo:

'61. We both got there in '61.

Baerbel:

Yeah, we both got there in '61. So, we met there, we were grad students in the geology department at Penn State. That's how we met. And, but anyhow—

Ivo:

A long time ago.

Baerbel:

Anyway, the thing was that after we got our PhDs, he's the one that got the job and I didn't have a job. But then, , the opportunity for astrogeology came along, and that was for the Moon. And I said, "I don't care, I'll do the Moon. It's fine. As far as I'm concerned, I don't mind drawing circles (craters). I just want to do something." And that's how I got into planetary geology. It was not at all something that I was planning. It just happened.

Hargitai:

But you stayed.

Baerbel:

I stayed, and Ivo started that way, but he went back to terrestrial geology.

Ivo:

Well, I did not start—I mean, no. I was not in planetary geology.

Baerbel:

No, but you were doing Moon stuff.

Ivo:

Well, yeah, training astronauts and all that.

Baerbel:

Yeah, but we both started with the Moon program

Ivo:

With the Apollo program, okay.

Baerbel:

With the Apollo program. That's how we got to Flagstaff and that's how we both started to work.

Hargitai:

And was that Apollo 17?

Baerbel:

For me? No, it wasn’t, no, no. For me, as I said…

Ivo:

Way before.

Baerbel:

I was starting as a technician. And then I made all kinds of maps for landing sites. Not just Apollo 17. I made one for the Proclus site, [inaudible 1:17:31], I think They made us make sketch maps, they were not to be published. They were just maps of lots of potential landing sites, because they didn't know where they wanted to go. And I can tell you one thing, pertaining to that picture you have here, where I'm standing in the background? There was Jack Schmitt, in the meeting. It was a big meeting in Flagstaff, where they were trying to decide where to go on Apollo 17.. I was not part of the meeting. I was just standing around, listening in. And I noticed that Jack Schmitt wanted to go to Taurus Littrow, which then became the Apollo 17 site. It was quite obvious to me that's where he wanted to go. So, after this meeting, I went to my boss and I said, "You know, I'm making all these landing site maps, why don't you give me the Taurus Littrow one?" He said, "Okay." And that's how I got onto the Apollo 17 mission. I made the geologic map for what became the Apollo 17 site I got to know the astronauts. I flew to the Cape to teach them. I suddenly had arrived as a geologist. That was the launch of my career. That map. And it was only because my intuition said “Taurus Littrow for Apollo 17, that is it. So, that's how it started for me. And then I liked making planetary maps. Ivo didn't care for it very much, but I liked working on the Moon,, and then I liked much more working on Mars. And so I've done it all my life because I liked it.

Hargitai:

And why you moved back to terrestrial? So that's the opposite opinion.

Ivo:

Because I like to see what's actually there.

Hargitai:

So field geology.

Ivo:

Field geology.

Baerbel:

Field geology, he's a field geologist. Yeah, yeah.

Ivo:

And they wanted field geologists for Apollo because we were supposed to teach field geology to the astronauts. You needed to be a terrestrial geologist for that. And then , I'd done my PhD thesis on the Grand Canyon. I mean, I just went on doing this kind of stuff, which I like.

Baerbel:

Well, he's the one that established the age of the Grand Canyon. Only, what, 6 million?

Ivo:

Five to six.

Baerbel:

Five to six million.

Hargitai:

From your field geologic study?

Baerbel:

Yes. It came from his study, yes. 

Hargitai:

So how can you figure out the...

Ivo:

That age?

Hargitai:

Uh-huh.

Ivo:

Because I was working at the mouth of the Grand Canyon, and there were some deposits across the mouth of the Grand Canyon which are not river deposits.

Baerbel:

There was no river there.

Ivo:

There was no river [crosstalk 1:20:16]. So, if you date those deposits, you can date the maximum age of the Grand Canyon.

Baerbel:

The river had to come later than those deposits.

Hargitai:

So, it's stratigraphy.

Baerbel:

So, it's stratigraphy, yeah.

Ivo:

And that's what I like. I like being out in the field in very remote places. If I can. 

Hargitai:

And have you thought at that time with Apollo 17, that that's going to be the last group of astronauts that you're going to train?

Ivo:

Well, we knew it pretty well, because the country had just lost interest. You know, after 17, Apollo just disappeared completely. I mean, bang, gone.

Baerbel:

There were more missions scheduled at the time, and I don't think, when we did the Apollo 17, that we knew that was the last one, no, we didn't know that. But the writing was on the wall, as they say. The following missions were scrapped, because nobody was interested anymore. They had won the war with Russia. It was all about competition with Russia. You know, who gets there first, right? And they got there first and then they weren't interested anymore.

Hargitai:

Yes, but they continued the planetary exploration stuff.

Ivo:

Yeah.

Baerbel:

Oh yeah, yeah, but it wasn't the Moon, it was general planetary exploration, yeah, they continued that. The attention shifted towards Mars at the time. Well, there is, interest in the Moon now, because of Artemis [crosstalk 1:21:43]. So, I'm sure that there is more lunar mapping coming up. But for quite a long time, there really was no urgent need for any detailed lunar maps. Basically, we understand the Moon pretty well, how it works. 

Hargitai:

If you would need to talk to a Congressman who gives the money, the public money, for planetary mapping, how could you persuade someone that this is important? So why is this important?

Baerbel:

You can go two ways. You can say it is because there are things to explore out there. There's potential use for us...

Ivo:

Minerals.

Baerbel:

You know, mining But I don't think that is valid, because it would be way too expensive to go there to mine some precious metal or whatever it is that they're after. The other thing is, it's knowledge.

Ivo:

But that never gets money.

Baerbel:

Because we, humankind, has always wanted to know more. It's the human drive to know more, to understand what's out there. And this drive to understand what's out there, I think, is really strong. You have to get enough people that know how to persuade a Congressman, that going to Mars is something that's worthwhile doing. Even if it's just for exploration. Because we have to understand the universe. Or, even if it is just for the glory. Back to the premise, we got there first, right?

Ivo:

And actually, in terms of gaining knowledge, I think that on Mars, those vehicles, those rovers can do more than a person can. They can do—

Baerbel:

It doesn't have to be manned.

Ivo:

It doesn't have to be people.

Baerbel:

With people, it excites people. If you have people that are on another planet, people on the Moon, the public gets behind it. They get stimulated.

Ivo:

Maybe, maybe.

Baerbel:

They get excited about it. Nowadays, if you just have a bunch of rovers running around on Mars, everybody goes, "Huh."

Ivo:

Well, people get pretty excited about that.

Baerbel:

Yeah, they get—

Ivo:

Like that helicopter, that really got a lot of people's attention.

Baerbel:

You have to do something spectacular and not routine. Then it gets exciting. But it's not like having a manned mission. Then people would really get excited.

Ivo:

But whether they get excited enough to allow billions of dollars to be spent on that, that's a different story.

Baerbel:

Probably not. 

Ivo:

Now, one thing that has really helped in a very different way, the space telescopes. I mean, those are amazing things, and I think a lot of people have become quite interested in that.

Baerbel:

Astronomy, you know, that's out there right now. It's mind-boggling. I don't understand much of it. I'm not an astronomer. People think when you're a planetary geologist , you are an astronomer. No, no. I am not.

Ivo:

No, not at all.

Baerbel:

I come from geology. I know little about astronomy. I really don't care where Mars is in the solar system. I worry about what's going on on the surface of Mars.

Ivo:

I think that what is really needed are people who are good at talking and at explaining.

Baerbel:

Well, Sagan was a good guy.

Ivo:

Sagan was a good guy, but he's long gone. And how many people are like Sagan anyway?

Baerbel:

And Masursky was good at that behind the scenes.

Ivo:

Eh, it's true enough.

Baerbel:

He never got a big name for himself, like Sagan did, but he was pretty good, behind the scenes, to get the establishment, the money people, interested. Shoemaker, he also was a very good person in that way. He was extremely bright. Of course, he's long dead, so that doesn't help anybody now.

Ivo:

But he got fed up with the whole thing. You know, he went to be the chairman at Caltech because he got fed up with dealing with NASA.

Baerbel:

He didn't like the bureaucracy. He couldn't stand the bureaucracy. So, he quit. 

Ivo:

And actually, that's another aspect that's interesting, that in the Apollo days, we, the USGS—were a pretty free organization in the sense that bureaucracy was minimal. You know, the whole lunar exploration was so much out there somewhere, that most people didn't even understand what was happening, and we had a lot of freedom. And so, we could accomplish things.

Baerbel:

And not only that, they threw a lot of money at it at the time. there was a lot of money available, as Ivo says, no strings attached They pretty much trusted the people that were doing the job to do a good job. And they all worked very, very hard to do a good job.

Ivo:

They did a good job.

Baerbel:

And that's not true anymore nowadays. If you want money for anything, the bureaucracy is so bad that by the time you get the money, the project is outdated.

Hargitai:

You spend more time on bureaucracy than on the project itself.

Baerbel:

Oh yeah. Yeah, and that's one reason why I retired early. I retired already in '95. 

Ivo:

Well, we both did.

Baerbel:

We both did. We've been retired forever. We retired because of the bureaucracy.

Ivo:

One of the things there.

Baerbel:

That's the main reason why I retired. Neither one of us wanted to quit work, and we didn't quit work. We kept on working. 

Ivo:

We just worked without getting paid.

Baerbel:

We worked without getting paid, as volunteers. And I still have an office here, because we kept working for free. But we had a pension, so we could afford it In fact, here were two of us with a pension. We didn't care for the money. We loved the job. But we didn't like the bureaucracy. Overall, this country has been very good to us.

Ivo:

Very good to us.

Baerbel:

And we would never go back, because if you have lived, 50 years, your entire adult life, in a certain area, you would not go back to Europe. That was our childhood.

Ivo:

Although the thought of a chalet in the mountains of Austria is appealing to me. I'm a mountain person. But of course, when you think about it practically, no. It would never work.

Baerbel:

I have a little autobiography, which is not published Just for myself. I. In that, I mentioned that, when I started to look into carriers, I liked almost everything that ended in "-ology." Not just geology. Anthropology, archaeology, ethnology,. You name it, I was interested in it.

Ivo:

We're both fascinated in all of these things.

Baerbel:

I love that stuff. The reason why I never considered those subjects as a career, is, because you can't make money. The only thing you can do is be at a university or a museum. I settled on geology because I knew with geology, you can g make money. You can go into oil industry, coal industry. , There are lots of opportunities to make money. And, I was very intent on having a job, because I was a young woman, and I wanted to be independent. That was not the way every woman was, but there were some women at that time that felt that way, and I was one of them. I wanted to be on my own. I did not want to be supported by a husband and be a housewife.

Ivo:

Well, I think that anti-science is actually present everywhere. For example, I encountered this a lot in the Grand Canyon. The so-called "creationists", who maintain that the Grand Canyon was made 2,000 years ago or so. You cannot really argue with them at all. They won't listen. had an interview here, where I was interviewed as a member of the "opposition" to their ideas, so to speak. They wanted it to be fair. I basically told them, "Okay, the entire world that you live in, everything that you use, all the gadgets. Your computers, your cars, your clothing, your airplane. Everything, everything in your life, just about, is a product of science. And this means that science is very successful. And so, are you going to tell me that science has managed to get it right in almost everything, but in the case of the Grand Canyon, it's wrong? So totally wrong?" They went away. (laughs)

Baerbel:

And then they never published his interview either.

Ivo:

My interview ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Baerbel:

(laughs)

Hargitai:

I don't know how to conclude this optimistically.

Ivo:

(laughs) Well, you know, there have been very bad times before in the history of the world. Somehow or other, something positive happened. Maybe people finally learned we cannot continue this way. This is ridiculous, we're going to do something else. And there could be a sudden change. You never know. I mean, you cannot predict it, but if you look at history, it can happen. 

Hargitai:

Thank you very much.

Ivo:

Well, it's been a pleasure.