SCIENTIST LICKED MOON ROCK.
Robin Brett, a NASA scientist, died Sept. 27 at his home in Washington. He was 84.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Jill Brett.
From 1969 to 1974, Brett was chief of geochemistry at NASA’S Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. In July 1969, he was one of just four scientists present for the opening of a sealed box containing the first moon rocks from the initial Apollo lunar mission.
Before that mission, three theories had been debated about how the moon came into existence.
“The first theory held that the moon was torn from the earth by a fission process,” New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford wrote in his book We Reach the Moon. “The second was that the moon was formed at the same time as the earth as a sort of twin planet. The third was that the moon was unrelated to the earth and was captured by earth’s gravity.”
Wilford quoted Brett: “All three theories have weaknesses. The composition of the returned lunar samples makes it difficult to derive them from anything like the composition of the earth’s mantle. This, therefore, makes the fission theory extremely unlikely. And if the moon was formed as an identical twin planet with the same composition as the earth’s mantle, the same argument applies against that theory. The capture theory presents difficulties in celestial mechanics and is regarded as statistically fairly improbable.”
The prevailing theory now, said Everett Gibson, an emeritus NASA scientist who also worked on the lunar samples, is that the moon was formed from a major impact on Earth, early in its existence, of another large astronomical object.
Peter Robin Brett was born in Australia on Jan. 30, 1935. He got his degree in geology from the University of Adelaide in 1956 and a doctorate in geology and geochemistry from Harvard in 1963.
Variously, he worked with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
His first marriage, to Abigail Trafford, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, two daughters, two stepsons, a sister and four grandchildren.
The lunar samples were initially quarantined, lest they contain or exude a noxious substance. Brett doubted that necessity, which he demonstrated, he said, by becoming the first man on Earth to lick a moon rock. What did it taste like? “A dirty potato,” he answered.