A Mars Odyssey

In 1992, NASA had contacted Dr. James L. Carter to make fake moon dirt and now that they space agency is planning more moon explorations, the bone-dry ashy substance that Carter produces is needed again.  After 43 years of teaching and researching at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Carter still has a job to do and that is making fake moon dirt.

As an expert on lunar soil, he is running a full-time business.  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other researches buys tons of lunar regodith(?)  stimulant, or fake moon dirt.  The bone-dry ashy substance is used for testing special equipment that will be use on the lunar surface.  NASA ran out of its original source and only Dr. Carter has the correct recipe.  “When you land on the moon, all this dry, dry dust blows into the space craft’s engines”, he says.  “The astronauts’ safety rests on this substance being correct.  There can be no mechanical failures once you’re parked n the moon’s surface.”

Dr. Carter became familiar with moon dirt when NASA brought him soil samples back to earth from astronauts on the first Apollo flight.  He identified the chemical materials and the mineralogy.  Then, in 1992, NASA contacted him about the possibility of making the moon dirt artificially for use in their experiments.  Using rocks from a volcanic quarry in Arizona, Carter has produced more than forty tons of the moon dirt.

His business is secretly located in North Texas and his manufacturing process is also a secret. Large plastic bags hold up to 3,000 pounds each and they are transported on 18-wheeler trucks to Houston.  Dr. Carter says “Moon dirt’ is a misnomer.  “Technically, the moon doesn’t have dirt.  There’s no water, no oxygen and thus no clay.  Everything is in a complete vacuum”, he says.

Dr. Carter’s areas of research include other studies besides moon dirt.  His studies have included everything from the earth’s upper crust to environmental geochemistry to paleontology.  He is known for his assistance in discovering fossil remains of a Sauropod(?) dinosaur in the Big Bend National Park.

The School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics has established a scholarship in his honor in order to recognize the popular geoscientist and his years of mentoring graduate students.  The James L. Carter Scholarship is for graduate and undergraduate students pursuing degrees in geosciences.  “Everything intrigued him whether it was rock, mineral, fossil, plant or just the scenery”, said Mary E. Cast, former graduate student and now a quality assurance chemist with the U.S. Geological Survey.  “His mind was always going, and to keep pace, you had to engage your mind as well.  Nothing was too mundane to catch his attention.”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 5:04 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.