Watching the news yesterday

Yesterday, July 20, 2009, was the 40th Anniversary for an American hero, Neil Armstrong, to be the first man to set foot on the moon. It was an accomplishment of epic proportion, and if you were old enough to witness the live broadcast of the event, I bet you still remember exactly where you were and who you were with while you watched it!

The lunar landing was broadcast live to hundreds of millions of people back here on Earth. The focus at the time was about whether or not three brave pioneers would ever return to Earth…. because they left knowing there was only a 50/50 chance of them ever returning to Earth.

They did return home, all of them, safely and in one piece. It was sensational... the whole project seems so far ahead of it’s time, especially when you compare today’s technology to the technology of 1969. You see, every cell phone today has 100 times the computing power of what they had for the entire Apollo mission! Truly amazing!

Can you imagine how much work went into planning, testing, and building the Columbia which orbited the moon (piloted by Colonel Collins) while the Eagle with “Buzz” Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, actually LANDED on the moon. Think of how many people were behind the scenes at “Mission Control” in Houston, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and other places around the world!

Last night on the phone I was speaking with Peter Frei about the 40 year Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing as he told me where he was and what he was doing at that time. Peter Frei was 18 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He watched the event live from his parents’ home in Spreitenbach, Switzerland, with his friend Markus Hächler. Back then, televisions were still too expensive to have more then one in a home, and some people did not even have a TV. Peter was always a tinkerer, an inventor and a problem solver. He managed to have his own TV all to himself after finding an old television in the trash. He took it home and fixed it up. The Television had no case but Peter made a remote control for the TV. Back then though, there was no such thing as “wireless remote.” Peter and his friend watched “the event of the century” on that TV that he himself rebuilt.

The race into space was part of the cold war. While it was primarily politically driven, science certainly did not take a back seat. NASA offered scientists around the world the opportunity to compete in a contest. The best experiments would be taken to the moon to be done by the crew of the Apollo 11! The criteria for the experiments were simple; they had to be significant for science, easy to setup, and they could not weigh much.

NASA chose three experiments to be conducted by the crew of the Apollo 11 mission. Once “The Eagle landed” on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Colonel Aldrin set up these three experiments; a Passive Seismic Experiment, a Laser Ranging Retroflector experiment, and a Solar Wind Composition Experiment. The Solar Wind Composition Experiment, “SWC” was the only non-American Experiment. The SWC was the idea of three Swiss Scientists, Professor Peter Eberhard, Professor Johannes Geiss, and Professor Peter Signer of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH).

Do you know what a Solar Wind Composition Experiment is? (Yeah... I didn’t either!) Basically a large sheet of aluminum foil (the foil was about four and a half feet long and less than a foot wide) was set on a pole facing the sun. This allows solar wind particles to embed themselves on the foil. The foil was then brought back to Earth to be analyzed. The analysis was done by a lab at the Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland.

Peter Frei, prior to being a thorn in Earl Johnson’s, James Wettlaufer’s, and other corrupt town official’s side, worked in his younger years in this very lab! The Federal Institute of Technology has a department called the Institut für Kristallographie and Petrographie of the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule (ETH) and THAT is where Peter worked in Professor Peter Signer’s team. Signer’s Solar Wind Composition Experiment SWC was so successful that it became part of five out of six Apollo missions that followed the Apollo 11 mission.

The Apollo 17 mission was concluded on December 19, 1972. Peter Frei joined Professor Signer’s team on March 1st the following year.

Prior to the Apollo missions, Signer’s research was limited to decipher early solar system history with isotope studies on meteorites and terrestrial rocks and minerals. To study the solar corpuscular radiation of the past by means of noble gas analyses in lunar soils and rocks was a privilege only given to the six top labs around the world.

It was actually in part Peter’s engineering work that was instrumental in achieving superior results for the group of scientists working in Signer’s lab.

Peter developed and built the electronic heart of the ultra-high vacuum gas source mass spectrometer; the magnetic field regulator and power supply for the magnets used to measure the spectrum of the isotopes of the five stable noble gas elements, He, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe, found in, lunar soils, meteorites, rocks and minerals. The system was finished by Peter in late 1978 and had a ten times higher resolution than anything else known to scientists at that time. The superiority of the highly complex system was unmatched and was only replaced 20 years later. That is an impressive run for any piece of technology! The magnetic field regulator was not only 10 times more accurate, it was the first one that could not only be operated manually, but could also be fully controlled by a computer via an interface. The extraction line (photomultiplier) was synchronized with the rest of the machine, a real first at the time.

To read some of the publications by Professor P. Signer and his team, click here!

During Peter’s employment in Signer’s lab, Neil Armstrong, together with Bruno Stanek, visited the lab. Peter even had an opportunity to met Neil Armstrong in person and shook his hand.

Peter left the lab in March of 1979 to concentrate on his studies and then graduated as an HTL (Höhere Technische Lehranstalt) Engineer (same as masters degree in this country) in April of 1980.

July 21, 2009, Dana Manning