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DAVE: This is the only long-term information that we have from the surface of the Moon.

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PAT: I don't think the search for data is over with.

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ERNIE: Where did all of this stuff come from? How did it form? What was the process?

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Does it happen all the time across the universe? Or are we somehow unique or at least unusual? What does it all mean?

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NARRATOR: I'm Katie Atkinson, and this is NASA Explorers: Apollo, where we tell stories about our Moon and the people who explore it.

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ARCHIVAL AUDIO FOOTAGE: Tape recorder's running.

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[MUSIC]

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NARRATOR: 50 years ago,  NASA's Apollo program brought humans further into space than we'd ever gone before.

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On July 20th 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trekked the surface of the Moon for two and a half hours.

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The Apollo 11 crew would spend about a week in space.

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But us?  We're still learning.  By all appearances scientific discoveries seem to happen in an instant.

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We often forget that science progresses slowly, quietly inching us towards something meaningful.

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We pick up pieces of information over decades, try to make sense of them and then venture into a new set of mysteries to untangle.

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[MUSIC]

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It takes time. For the Apollo program, at least half a century... and we're not done yet.

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The Moon still has plenty of unanswered questions for us.

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ARCHIVAL AUDIO FOOTAGE: (APOLLO 11 LIFT-OFF NARRATION) T-Minus one minute, 35 seconds on the Apollo mission,

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the flight to land the first men on the Moon … all indications coming into the control center at this time indicate we are a go

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… one minute, 25 seconds and counting.

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NARRATOR: During NASA’s Apollo program, six crews of astronauts landed on the Moon.

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During those visits, the astronauts set up what were called Lunar Surface Experiment Packages.

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They were heat flow experiments, solar wind spectrometers, ion detectors...

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instruments that studied the Moon inside and out.

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These scientific experiments gathered massive amounts of information and sent it back to Earth.

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But the thing about that data? A lot of it... was misplaced.

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[MUSIC]

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NARRATOR: Dave Williams is on a mission to track it down.

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DAVE: I work on a lot of the older Apollo data, which is really sort of incomplete.

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Unfortunately towards the end of the Apollo program, a lot of the data were just archived away and weren't really looked at.

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And, the other problem is that back in the 70s the data were archived

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on things like microfilm, microfiche, that were really almost inaccessible.

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This is the only long-term information that we have from the surface of the Moon.

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There's just nothing else.

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And so we decided if we really wanted to know about the Moon, we were going to have to restore these data.

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NARRATOR: Dave is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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He's also a data detective.

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Dave's job is to find, digitize and archive lost data from the Apollo era

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so they can be used by researchers for generations to come.

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Uncovering these data could help scientists make new discoveries about our Moon, as we plan to send humans back by 2024.

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But tracking down the information is an incredible challenge.

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DAVE: There wasn't a lot done with these data. So when we went back to them, we had to dust these things off.

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You know, a lot of things you just can't figure out by looking at them... and so we had to go find old documentation,

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we had to try to find the principal investigators or the other scientists who worked on the experiments,

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or the technicians who built the experiments and find out from them how the things worked, and how the data were returned, and that sort of thing.

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NARRATOR: When he began his search for data, Dave approached scientist Patrick Taylor to ask him and his colleagues what needed to be saved.

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PAT: Well we looked at each other and we said...

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each instrument, each program was very highly reviewed and vetted. They're all good. They're all important. You can't just rate them.

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NARRATOR: That's Pat. He's a NASA scientist who thinks that every bit of data is an important piece of the puzzle.

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Dave's restoration of old heat flow data, for example,

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helped Pat make a new discovery about our Moon.

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PAT: So while we didn't have a lot of data, we found enough to confirm that the lunar surface underneath the surface was heating up

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instead of reaching equilibrium temperature.

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NARRATOR: The restored data allowed Pat and his team to study the transfer of heat through the Moon's surface and subsurface.

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They learned that the Moon is a little bit more active than previously thought.

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When the Apollo astronauts trekked across the Moon,

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their footprints disturbed the Moon's surface,

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changing the way it absorbs and reflects light and heat.

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Knowing how heat moves through the Moon helps us figure out how it formed, how it evolved and what it's made of.

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PAT: So the heat flow tells us, is the Moon dead? Is it alive? How much is it alive? What's the distribution

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of radioactive elements in the near surface?

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And our data showed that if you disturb the structure on the lunar regolith, you'll change its thermal history.

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When we go back to the Moon with robotic missions, the heat flow instrument has to be designed

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so as not to overly disturb the surrounding area where it's going into the hole.

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So in that regard, our work is important for future missions.

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NARRATOR: And according to Pat, the hunt for data is far from finished.

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PAT: I don't think the search for data is over with.There's got to be more data out there!

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The Moon has still got a lot of secrets it's keeping.

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NARRATOR: To find those secrets, Dave and his team look for first-hand sources,

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the people who were there during the Apollo era and can help shed some light on what was collected.

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DAVE: Luckily, there were still an awful lot of people around from the Apollo days who still remembered this stuff, for one thing,

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which I find amazing. I mean, I try to figure out what I was doing 2 weeks ago,

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and these guys are remembering what they did 40 years ago.

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NARRATOR: Sometimes, Dave's research involves making house calls.

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In 2016, he and his team visited the man who worked at NASA during the Apollo era,

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a man named Otto Berg.

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DAVE: He was a principal investigator for one of the instruments.

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We did get hold of him, and we talked to him, and he said oh yeah, he had all these detailed notebooks

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and if we would like to look at them, we could come visit him and take a look at the notebooks.

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Now this is this fellow was 90-something years old

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and we called him the day before...

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he said 'well, I just got out of hospital, I've been really sick, I'm not feeling well,

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but you can still come up, but I may not be able to talk that long.'

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We went up and sure enough he did look a little sick, a little tired.

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He brought out his books and he started talking to us.

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NARRATOR: Otto worked on an experiment that analyzed cosmic dust from the Moon's surface.

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DAVE: While he was talking to us, you could see him, suddenly start to lighten up and then he just kept talking and talking

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about his experiment and he just seemed like he was getting better and better while he was talking about it.

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We ended up being there for like two and a half hours talking to him about all this stuff

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and then he ended up lending us his notebooks, his personal notebooks, so that we could scan them.

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They were really beautiful notebooks, I mean, he had written down everything really carefully.

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He had made graphs, all different colored pens he had used to highlight different things.

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They were really quite something, and we scanned every one of them and now, I feel like all this stuff is is completely saved... forever.

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[MUSIC]

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NARRATOR: Otto Berg passed away in January of 2017. He was 99 years old.

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The work that he dedicated his career to is now free and accessible through the National Space Science Data Center --

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for anyone who wants to learn more about Earth's closest neighbor.

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Thanks to Dave's team, current and future scientists can use information like this

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to paint a more detailed picture of the Moon.  Data from the Apollo era gives us a window to the past,

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as NASA plans to send astronauts back to the surface of the Moon in the near-future.

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Data collected with today's technology, combined with information preserved from the Apollo program,

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places us at the edge of new discoveries.

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DAVE: In so many ways, this really is the golden age of understanding our solar system. There's all sorts of amazing missions out there now

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that are returning data at a rates and with instruments that we couldn't have even dreamed of 40 years ago.

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NASA is probably doing more science and for understanding of the solar system

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and the universe than, than ever.

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NARRATOR: Everything we collect, even the scribbles of a personal notebook,

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helps scientists learn more about our Moon, furthering our understanding of the universe.

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[MUSIC]

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NARRATOR: We asked you to help NASA tell the story of Apollo.

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Hundreds of people answered ... from all over the world.

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Here's what Ketan from Sugarland, Texas remembers:

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KETAN: My memory of the Apollo Moon landing is probably going to be very different

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because I was not in the US, I was a five-year-old child in Mumbai, India in 1969. We did not have a TV,

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so we did not see the event live.

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My family and some family friends -- we all saw the event a few months later,

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probably October or November 1969. My dad heard about the United States having sent a man to the Moon,

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and he wanted to give his children a first-hand look. He got the film on loan from the United States Information Service,

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hired a technician, rented a projector,

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and invited his nieces and some friends.

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We all saw the film together, projected on a wall in the living room.

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The wall must have been about 10 feet wide and 12 feet tall. It was painted white, and all the picture frames and decorations

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were taken off for the film projection.

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I clearly remember that that was the day when I fell in love with everything associated with America -- the country,

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the people, the inventions and NASA.  My deep interest in science is partly because of that film.

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Thanks NASA, for everything!

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NARRATOR: Thanks, Ketan for sharing the story with us.

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What do you remember about Apollo?

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Or what space exploration, do you hope you get to see in your lifetime?

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NASA wants to hear your Apollo stories. Visit nasa.gov/apollostories to learn how to get involved.

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This audio series was produced at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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The NASA Explorers: Apollo team includes Micheala Sosby, Haley Reed, and Katie Atkinson, with original music by Daniel Wytanis and Lee Rosevere.

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If you like this NASA Explorers series, help us grow by sharing the show with a friend or leaving us a review. Thank you.

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[MUSIC]