Seiichi Nagihara began to sweat as he dug through long-forgotten boxes in a cluttered basement storeroom at a Columbia University outpost in Palisades, N.Y. But the trim 54-year-old kept working. It was June 2013, and he had come all the way from Texas to search for decades-old clues about the moon.
Nagihara pawed through the yellowing files of Marcus Langseth, a Columbia geologist who died in 1997. Between the late 1960s and mid ’70s, Langseth was in charge of a project to study how heat escaped from the moon’s interior, using sensors deployed by astronauts during the Apollo missions. This experiment was just one part of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), the only comprehensive set of moon-based studies humans have ever conducted.
Nagihara, a geophysicist at Texas Tech University, hoped to reanalyze Langseth’s heat data with modern analytical techniques on computers that scientists back then could only dream of. But as much as half of the ALSEP data had gone missing since Congress pulled the plug on the project’s funding in 1977.
Now, Nagihara and a band of researchers-turned-detectives are racing to recover the lost data before it’s too late. The last scientists who worked on the Apollo missions are aging fast, as are the fragile magnetic tapes on which the data were recorded and the machines that can read them.
