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| "Houston,
Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." These words were uttered by Neil Armstrong as the first manned flight to the Moon touched down. This flight, like no other, ushered in a new era of human exploration at 4:18 pm EDT on July 20,1969. For the next three years, NASA continued its geographical exploration of the moon with five more lunar missions. In 1972, scientists at NASA took a very risky gamble. They scheduled the last two lunar missions for April and December of that year: Apollo 16 and 17. After December there would be no more flights to the moon. What NASA did not know was that it was scheduling its most dangerous moon missions ever. Just as we have hurricanes on the Earth which develop off the coast of Africa and travel across the Atlantic Ocean, the Sun was developing a storm of its own, which was to cross the 93,000,000 miles between here and the sun. Whereas a hurricane throws a torrent of rain and fierce winds at the Islands in the Caribbean, the Sun throws forth atomic particles and radiation at a colossal rate. Called a Coronal Mass Ejection, the sun's storm takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to arrive at the moon. Just such an event occurred on August 2, 1972: almost exactly half-way between the last two Apollo missions. The sun ejected an enormous bubble-shaped burst of highly energetic atomic particles equal to 220,000,000,000 pounds (or 100 = billion kg). Just imagine Lake Ontario turned to atomic particles and rushing toward the Earth through space at millions of miles per second and lasting for hours. This pool of rushing gas and particles has the equivalent energy of 100 Earth hurricanes. With the first wave of the solar storm, the Earth received X-Ray bursts, followed by other radioactive waves and particles. These initial events foretell of the far more dangerous event: the arrival of solar protons. An astronaut standing on the moon, facing the sun, would have only about 50 minutes warning time before the energetic protons would engulf him with 5,000 rems of radiation, five times the amount which would kill most people within minutes. This was even enough radiation to kill astronauts inside the protection of their space ships. NASA is concerned about radiation. Radiation has the ability to harm astronauts, interfere with computer functions, knock out solar arrays, and disrupt guidance and navigation systems. |
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