NASA 'detective' on track of America's 'moon trees'
It's possible to drive past one or more of them every day on the way to work.
One could be in a family photo album, posing in the background during your last trip to a national park.
In what could be one of the strangest lost-and-found cases ever, a NASA scientist is trying to figure out what happened to possibly hundreds of so-called "moon trees."
The trees started out as seeds stowed away in a metal canister during the Apollo 14 lunar mission 40 years ago as part of a publicity stunt. Some were later planted and grew.
Fifty of them -- including six in Pennsylvania -- have been accounted for.
The rest⢠That's anyone's guess.
"We're having to rely on people's memories at this point," said Dave Williams, a planetary curation scientist for NASA's National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're hoping that, by getting the word out, people will remember seeing a tree-planting ceremony, a newspaper clipping about it, something."
Here's what we know:
Apollo 14 launched on Jan. 31, 1971. Aboard were astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr., Stuart A. Roosa and Edgar D. Mitchell, a Carnegie Institute of Technology grad.
Stan Krugman, then the staff director for forest genetics research at the Forest Service, persuaded Roosa, a former smoke jumper, to bring 400 to 500 tree seeds with him on the flight. They were kept in a canister.
Mitchell and Shepard landed on the moon on the fifth day of the mission; Roosa orbited above them in a command module with the seeds in tow, and never touched down.
When the crew returned to Earth on Feb. 9, 1971, the Forest Service reclaimed the seeds and tried to germinate them. Scientists had doubts whether any of them would sprout, thinking space travel could stress them.
But they did.
Roughly 420 to 450 tree seedlings germinated from the cache that was sent into space.
After that, details get murky. It's not clear how many of them survived long enough to grow into trees, Williams said.
Not even Mitchell, the last living Apollo 14 crew member, has a clue.
"(Roosa's) family for a while kept up with them. Whenever one was planted or there was a ceremony, they were there," Mitchell, 80, said from his home near Lake Worth, Fla. "But it's a great story. Every time it (news of the trees) comes up, I'm always amused and tickled by the attention it gets."
The seeds were various: redwood, loblolly pine, sycamore, Douglas fir and sweetgum. Many were planted during bicentennial ceremonies.
Pennsylvania's six moon trees are all sycamores. One is in Ebensburg and one in Hollidaysburg.
The Ebensburg tree once was encircled by a tiny wooden-plank fence and fashioned with a "moon tree" plaque. Today, its just one in the collage of trees and bushes outside the Cambria County Courthouse that helped the community in 2003 win a Pennsylvania Urban and Community Forestry Council award.
"It's unique that we have something right here in our community that went into outer space and back," said Robert W. Piper, district manager of the Cambria County Conservation District. "It's part of a great forestry tradition we have here in Western Pennsylvania."
Additional Information:
On the Web
Related Web site -- Click here for an interactive moon tree locator map.
If you think you've located a lost moon tree, send an email to dave.williams@nasa.gov .
