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I was saddened to hear today that we lost Prof. Brian O'Brien, who died peacefully after a long and productive career. He was principle investigator of the Apollo program's Dust Detector Experiment, a package that measured dust for months after the missions departed the Moon. https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1130468731535151104
2/ A funny story about Brian O'Brien. When he retired from the university in Perth, Australia, he discovered a set of data tapes in a cardboard box under a table. It turned out that these were the last surviving data tapes from the Apollo Dust Detector Experiment (DDE). So...
3/ Brian contacted NASA and made an offer. He said that he would give NASA a copy of these tapes if (and only if) NASA would give him a research grant to analyze the data contained on the tapes. Back at NASA, I got called into a meeting to discuss what to do about this.
4/ It was in all the newspapers not just in Australia but also in the US, that this Australian professor had discovered the last surviving copies of the data. And at NASA we were in the beginning stages of the Constellation Program, which was going to develop a lunar outpost. So,
5/ we were all highly motivated to learn about lunar dust, and this discovery of actual DATA from the MOON about the DUST was freaking amazing! The meeting started by people in Houston asking if we though it was true...
6/ Did Brian *really* have the only surviving copies? As far as everyone knew it was true. There were no other copies of those tapes. Somehow all NASA's copies had been lost or destroyed. (That isn't so unusual. Magnetic tapes don't survive in good condition for 40-50 years.)
7/ The next question was: do we really need this data? The answer was H E Double Toothpicks Yes. (I got that saying from my youngest daughter, by the way.) We were going to all kinds of extremes to understand lunar dust behavior, creating experiments, flying in reduced gravity...
8/ We had gotten old lunar hardware back from the Kansas Cosmodrome in order to take measurements. We were desperate for real data about lunar dust behaviors. So YESSSS we wanted the data. Then, the next question was...
9/ Should NASA send money to Brian to do this research to get him to also send us a copy of the tapes? TBH, I don't recall much of what was said in that part of the discussion, except I remember some joking about how the tapes were being held "hostage". Ha! But it was payback...
10/ Because Brian was convinced some bad stuff had happened during the Apollo program and this was his chance to correct history, making it right. More about that in a moment. And since Brian wasn't a US citizen and was in Australia, NASA had no leverage to get the tapes. And...
11/ since they were Brian's own copies of the tapes (he had been the Principle Investigator of that experiment) he did not "owe" them to anybody. NASA had originally had their own copies, and it wasn't Brian's fault or responsibility that they got lost or destroyed.
12/ For whatever reason, NASA decided not to send funds to Brian. (Well, NASA is in a touchy position and not normally allowed to send grants to non-US institutions.) So NASA didn't send any funds, and Brian didn't send any tapes. The only surviving copies remained in Australia.
13/ Part of the reasons Brian was so anxious to get funding was because he had been *wronged* during the Apollo program and he wanted to set the record straight. I heard Brian tell this story several times...
14/ He said that he analyzed the data from the DDE and gave it to NASA to go into the mission report. I can't recall if this was Apollo 11 or 12. According to Brian, the mission Flight Director didn't use Brian's report but instead made up a paragraph that denied Brian's results.
15/ So the Apollo mission report gave false information about the lunar dust related to that one experiment. Brian was very upset, of course, since he was the PI -- it was Brian's payload that he designed and he operated and he analyzed, but it was misrepresented in the report!
16/ When Brian discovered that cardboard box containing the surviving data tapes so many years later, he saw this as the chance to rescue his work and restore it to the science community. But he would need funding to do the analysis to produce all the results he needed.
17/ When NASA said "no" to the funding, Brian didn't give up. He used his own resources to make it happen. Over the next dozen years he sought out an ancient magnetic tape player that could play the tapes. He figured out the meaning of the 1's & 0's and turned them into science.
18/ And in the end, he made several remarkable discoveries about the behavior of lunar dust. He discovered that astronauts walking in low gravity caused dust to fly up and stick on the sensor, but as the sun came up the next lunar day the sunlight "cleaned" the dust off.
19/ He also saw that as the Apollo 12 Ascent Module lifted off the Moon, the rocket exhaust blew dust off the sensors, causing them to be cleaned. But the most remarkable discovery was that ever time the sun came up on the Apollo sites, a miniature dust storm occurred.
20/ With every successive sunrise the dust storm got smaller and smaller. He concluded that the Moon does not normally have these dust storms, but the disturbance of the missions "upset" the dust, so it took several of these mini dust storms before the dust became stable again.
21/ This discovery has been controversial, but I think it is correct. Brian emailed and called every now and then to discuss his findings, and I read his papers and analyzed his results in detail. The sunlight coming up over the horizon indicates the dust storm is 1 meter high.
22/ It suggests the dust storm is only in the local region where the soil has been disturbed -- by astronaut boots, rover wheels, plume ejecta, etc. It isn't global. It suggests the dust storms taper off during the next several sunrises after the soil got disturbed.
23/ This is important because it says that a lunar outpost will constantly have to deal with these local dust storms, because the soil will always be disturbed over and over again at an outpost. So we need to design hardware to manage this effect.
24/ So I will end by saying what a remarkable human story this is. He was at the end of a long life when he got this second wind to do science. I believe he was in his 80s. He believed it is never too late to follow your passions, and what a difference he made because of that!
25/ He was super passionate and earnest about his science until the end. I talked with him at a workshop in Houston just this past year. He flew in from Australia to present his research. Self-funded, in his 80s I think, and still crossing oceans to follow his passion. Wow!
26/ So here's a little suggestion. After additional missions confirm that this phenomenon of disturbance-induced lunar dust storms are real, then we should name them for Brian, the passionate person who fought Flight Directors, lack of funding, and age to convince us they exist.
27/27 Maybe they should be the O'Brien Effect, or O'Brien Dust Storms, or O'Brien Clouds. I think that would be fitting. Thank you Brian, and ad luna.
