Host | Matthew S Williams

For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

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Episode Notes

From Apollo to Artemis: What Lowell Observatory Knows About Going Back to the Moon

Fifty years is a long time to forget how to do something. That is, more or less, where NASA stood when Artemis 1 left the pad — and where it stands now, with Artemis 2 having put humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in half a century. The institutional memory had thinned. The people who built Apollo had moved on, retired, or passed away. The books, as Dr. Alex Polanski puts it in this episode, had to be dusted off.

Polanski, a Percival Lowell postdoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, joins host Matt to talk about what Artemis 2 actually proved, and why Lowell — an observatory better known for its exoplanet work and its founder's obsession with Mars — has always sat closer to crewed spaceflight than most people realize. The nine Apollo astronauts trained on the volcanic terrain of northern Arizona. They studied lunar maps made at Lowell. They walked the same ground tourists walk today, in the shadow of the Clark refractor.

The conversation moves from the geology of the Moon's Highlands and Maria to the meteorite work of Dr. Nick Moskowitz, the mapping happening at the USGS office down the road, and the longer question behind all of it: is the Moon a stepping stone to Mars, or a detour? Polanski makes the case for the stepping stone — not out of caution, but because there are things we don't yet know we need to know, and a one-second light delay is a much more forgiving classroom than a twenty-minute one.

And then there's what comes next. Radio telescopes in the craters of the far side, shielded from Earth's noise. Optical interferometers spread across lunar real estate, free of the atmospheric wobble that makes ground-based astronomy feel, in Polanski's words, like reading a note card at the bottom of a pool. For the first time, the possibility of actually seeing the surfaces of other stars.

Percival Lowell saw canals on Mars that weren't there. He may have been looking at the veins in his own eye. A century later, his observatory is helping figure out how to look at the real thing.

🎙️ Guest: Dr. Alex Polanski, Lowell Observatory 🌐 lowell.edu

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Resources

Dr. Alex Polanski's Twitter
https://x.com/AlexNeedsSpace

Dr. Alex Polanski's company
https://x.com/LowellObs

Dr. Alex Polanski's LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-polanski-9ba397113/

Dr. Alex Polanski's Facebook profile
https://www.facebook.com/alex.polanski.3

Moon to Mars / NASA's Artemis Program
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/

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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

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