ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE MOON: THRU CARLE M. PIETERS' ROSE-COLORED GLASSES
Carle McGetchin Pieters is a Professor of the first magnitude, combining the properties of her cutting-edge research and science, with her massive education of hundreds of Lunar and Planetary Geoscientists from around the world. She does this with her multi-component recipes of enthusiasm, eternal optimism, deadlines, laughter, white wine, punctuality, outlines, red wine, comradeship, et cetera, all served up in her fine Julia Childs’ bravado and mannerisms. The Pieters’ persona of science and education are world renown. Here is but one example.
Carle learned first-hand the value of the integration of the physics and crystal chemistry of minerals with their remotely sensed properties. With this far-sighted appreciation, she organized the Lunar Soil Characterization Consortium some 15 years ago, a combination of lunar scientists with complementing expertises (D. S. McKay; R.V. Morris; L.P. Keller, L.A. Taylor; CMP). They selected a representative suite of mare and highland lunar soils, with contrasting chemistries and maturities, and produced the best integrated array of chemical and physical data on these soil (Taylor et al., 2001 JGR, 2010, MaPS). These studies and derived data have become the bases of the absolute integration and interpretation of the remote sensing properties of soils on the Moon (as a representative of an airless-Planet) with the ground-truth of these real Apollo soils themselves.
In explaining Carle’s bubbling optimism to a NASA Administrator, who shall go unnamed (JG), the author of this abstract, in his ever shy manner, explained, “Carle, could be caught in the middle of a horrendous sh— storm; but she would look around and smile and say ’WOW! What a fantastic opportunity with this huge amount of fertilizer.’” Other examples to follow.