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[MUSIC PLAYING] GARY EICHTEN: Good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. Today, February 1 marks a dark day in the history of the US space program. It was two years ago today when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. All seven astronauts died in the accident.

Since the Columbia tragedy, the US shuttle program has been on hold, but flights are now scheduled to resume in May or June. And of course, unmanned space exploration continues with spectacular results. So in this hour in Midday, we're going to focus on the space program, specifically a University of Minnesota physicist who served as a NASA advisor for many, many years.

Robert Pepin, who's been at the university since 1965, was the science advisor for Apollo Lunar missions 14 through 17. He's an expert on the moon, Mars, and meteorites and a mentor and advisor to a new generation of physicists. Of course, Robert Pepin has also been a guest here on Midday many times over the years. Well, recently he sat down with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson in our Voices of Minnesota interview programs.

[ELLA FITZGERALD, "BLUE MOON"]

Blue moon

DAN OLSON: Robert Pepin has listened to astronauts on the moon rant about foul-tasting orange juice spiked with potassium salts to keep their hearts ticking.

ROBERT PEPIN: And what they said about orange juice and what they said about orange juice, I can't repeat here.

[LAUGHTER]

But let us say that I don't think either of them has ever had a glass of orange juice since they came back.

DAN OLSON: He's wangled meteor samples from a Minnesota homeowner who noticed an ugly rock in his yard.

ROBERT PEPIN: And it turned out to be a hunk of iron that weighed about 120 pounds. And he used it for a doorstop for the next 10 years.

DAN OLSON: You'll hear about these and other cosmic tales, including thrilling theories about the Earth-like planets that may lurk in deep space.

ROBERT PEPIN: Totally weird, completely different from our own solar system.

DAN OLSON: And you'll hear about Pepin's concern about creative design and how attempts to advance it as an explanation for things seemingly beyond explanation might affect young people to become scientists.

ROBERT PEPIN: Whose minds are not as free to range over the whole gamut, the whole sweep of possibilities as has been in the past.

DAN OLSON: All this and much more this hour with physicist Robert Pepin.

Blue moon

71-year-old University of Minnesota physicist Robert Pepin has a neatly combed shock of white hair. He's lean with not one extra pound of weight on his medium-height frame. He's wearing a fashionable black shirt, dark jacket, and dark pants during a recent interview in his Minneapolis campus office.

Pepin was among those who paved the way for what's become the next big thing in space exploration-- the techniques being used to locate distant solar systems. He's confident that even though none have been seen, somewhere out there in the cosmos is a solar system which has an Earth-like planet that may be capable of supporting life.

Scientists have detected wobbles around stars in distant solar systems which appear to show the presence of planets. And Pepin believes that because of the staggering number of solar systems out there, one or more must support planets not unlike Earth.

ROBERT PEPIN: We're beginning to understand our own solar system fairly well. But in terms of the general question of whether there are solar systems like this, solar systems at all, solar systems that could in fact promote the development of life that have a habitable zone where liquid, water, and life could develop, we have an example of one to study. That's our own. That's not statistically compelling.

And so in the 1970s, it began to seem that techniques were maturing to the point where one could actually look to see if neighboring star systems had planets around them. And at that time, in the early '80s, I chaired a committee of the Space Science Board, part of the National Academy of Sciences, called the Committee for Lunar and Planetary Exploration.

And we took our mission rather broadly. Planetary exploration need not be confined to the planets in our own solar system. And so the committee got very interested in how one might actually look for and detect planets around other nearby stars.

Now, I have to admit that I wasn't terribly interested in this to start with. But my very first graduate student, David Black, had gotten interested in this question and shamelessly used his influence with the chairman of this committee to suggest-- not too gently, that this would be a wonderful project for the committee to take up.

So we did actually, over the next year, year and a half or so, the first assessment of what techniques would be likely to pay dividends in the search for extrasolar planets. And there are actually three or four of these that were prime candidates, all of which by the way are now being utilized or at least planning to be utilized in the search for extrasolar planets.

But the one that looked most promising to us was called the astrometric technique. And it essentially made use of the fact that if there is a planet orbiting a star, the two or more objects will revolve around their common center of mass, which is not in the center of the star.

And so-- let me tell you how this work. Get a ruler, put a small blob of putty on one end, a big blob of putty on the other end. Find the point where they balance with your finger and then rotate around that balance point and look at the big blob. It will describe a circle.

And so the idea was that that circle might be happening at high enough velocity so that the light coming from the star as it first approaches you and then recedes from you in the circuit would have its frequency shifted in something that's called both a redshift when it's receding from you and blueshift when it's coming toward you so that the frequency signal, the shift could be detected by the fact that this thing, since it was not just sitting there but coming ultimately toward you and away from you as it went around this little circle, could actually be detected.

It's a technique called radial velocity measurements. And we thought that was the most promising one. And in fact, that is the most promising one. Using that now, something like 130 extrasolar planets have been discovered.

DAN OLSON: Or there what we think are their paths, not the planets themselves?

ROBERT PEPIN: You can't see the planets. You can't see the planets. But it's amazing by determining the motion of the parent star, what you can learn about the mass and the distance of the planets. And some of them are totally weird, completely different from our own solar system, super Jupiter-sized planets that go around their sun in days. So close to the star that it's amazing that they have survived.

DAN OLSON: So we have now established apparently with enough certainty to satisfy you that there are other solar systems.

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, there certainly are. But what we're looking for really is a solar system that's developed the way ours has. And so far, none of the 130 detections look like solar systems that look like ours.

DAN OLSON: Do you think it's inevitable that we will?

ROBERT PEPIN: Yes. Yeah, but it takes a particular combination of circumstances. These Jupiters, for example, once they migrate in close to the sun, they're going to destroy any planets that might have formed between their original location and the star itself. What we're looking for are solar systems that have Jupiters where our Jupiter is.

This, in many ways, can promote the formation of smaller rocky bodies between it and the star. And now the great thrust will be to try to find systems like that and to try to develop techniques which will actually allow us to identify these Earth-sized planets, which don't cause very much wobble by the way because they're so small.

But there are techniques underway to actually try to look at the extent to which a sun's starlight or a star's light is diminished by the transit of a very small planet across the surface of the star.

DAN OLSON: So probably a pretty good likelihood we'll find solar systems, not unlike our solar system, which raises the possibility we'll find planets there or we can at least conceive of planets there that might have the chance to hold life.

ROBERT PEPIN: Absolutely. And if you look at the downstream plan for this very major NASA undertaking, there will be a mission in a couple of years called Kepler, which is intended to look for the transit of small planets across the surface of stars, thus diminishing the amount of light that comes to us by, say, one part in 10,000. So it's very tricky.

Then there are elaborate missions. Terrestrial planet finder, for example, maybe in the next 10 or 15 years, which will try to actually see the light from small inner planets by masking out the light from the parent star. Somebody has described this, and I think in National Geographic article, as equivalent trying to see a firefly next to a lighthouse searchlight at a distance of 3,000 miles.

Now, there are techniques developing now that might be able to blank out the light from the parent star, so you could actually see a planet like this. And then there are other more elaborate techniques that are planned for 2020, 2030, which would try to actually look at the atmospheres of such planets to see if they can see a hallmark for the possibility of life on these planets. For example, an atmosphere enriched in oxygen.

It's commonly thought that you can't have free oxygen in an atmosphere without some way to generate it, and life does generate it.

[FRANK SINATRA, "FLY ME TO THE MOON"]

Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota physicist, Robert Pepin. This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Just over a year ago, President Bush set a goal of sending another human mission to the moon by the year 2020. The president also set a goal of a human mission to Mars. Robert Pepin says there's lots more to learn about both bodies.

Let's just for the sake of conversation start on the moon. Do we know is there water on the moon?

ROBERT PEPIN: Probably, Yes. The determinations for the North Pole of the moon where the sunlight never really hits very intensely. And it has apparently accumulated water from commentary impacts which water molecules hop around the surface of the moon until they wind up in what's called a cold trap. And they stay there mixed with dust, but the measurements are quite unambiguous.

DAN OLSON: And if there is water on the moon, why does it matter?

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, it matters, I think, mostly for subsequent colonization of the moon. Having water available, there are all sorts of things you can do with water. Not only drink it, but you can break it down and make oxygen. You can use it as a fuel source, all sorts of reasons.

Now, it's not a very nice part of the moon because we know already that there's very little water in the equatorial regions. But up at the poles, there appears to be water, though it needs a little more work.

DAN OLSON: But not like wells, not like we can drill it here on Earth, and certainly not lakes or sitting underneath like frozen lakes.

ROBERT PEPIN: Oh, no, no. This would be more or less like terrestrial permafrost. And it's going to be quite a job to separate it from the dust and use it in an effective way. The main problem I think is where it is in the shadowed parts of the poles of the moon. And there are other reasons-- perhaps scientific reasons for not really wanting to have a base there. But they'll go where the water is.

DAN OLSON: So we're still talking then, I gather, about colonizing the moon. Why is that?

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, we are. As far as the science is concerned-- and this goes to the recent presidential initiative of more detailed exploration of the moon, colonizing the moon, at least a lunar base. I don't think we'll quite colonize it in the traditional sense.

The reason for that, I think, is, first of all, it's a very important stepping stone into deep space missions because it's a lot easier to use the moon as a launch pad than it is for the Earth. There are things we don't know about the moon scientifically which are important. I think most of the progress, if we had a lunar base, about our knowledge of the moon would be incremental.

One of the very important questions is, how old is the moon? Very important. Going back to the theories that the moon was actually formed by a giant impact on the Earth, probably within 100 million years of the time the whole solar system started. And knowing when that happened in terms of how the Earth evolved is a pretty important question. I think probably that's the top question that could be answered by a more detailed exploration of the moon.

DAN OLSON: All right. On to Mars, a summary of Mars. Is sending a human exploration to Mars is that emerging as a priority?

ROBERT PEPIN: I will speak as a scientist rather than a politician.

DAN OLSON: I see the cloak of diplomacy now dropping across your face.

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, the other part of the presidential initiative is a ramp-up of efforts to get humans to Mars. I personally think that that's a very long way in the future. And there's a great deal to be done by robotic exploration in terms of learning more about the planet and where you would set up a Martian base. I would think several decades of work.

The other consideration is that a manned exploration, or should we say a person exploration, to Mars would be an enormously expensive undertaking. It would require the cooperation of the space programs of practically all the nations of the world in order to do that. And I don't think we're quite at that level of cooperation yet.

Mars is a fascinating planet. The recent robotic results from Spirit and particularly from Opportunity-- these two little spacecraft bouncing around the lunar surface or the Martian surface, unfolding themselves, deploying rovers that progress across the surface at the astounding rate of, what? 3 meters an hour or something like that, but what they've done, particularly Opportunity in that flat area, the Meridiani Planum.

[LAUGHTER]

DAN OLSON: You're leaning back to look at the cover of Science from December.

ROBERT PEPIN: I haven't forgotten the name. The unambiguous evidence that there was water flowing on the surface of Mars at the time, those deposits were laid down. Well, not unexpected because there was photogeologic evidence.

You can look at the surface of the planet from orbit and you find things that look startlingly like river valley networks and great flood outbursts. So the idea that there was water on Mars in its early history is nothing new, but this kind of detailed mineralogical confirmation of that, particularly Opportunity has turned up is absolutely astounding.

We need more robotic missions now that we have learned how to do it. Mars, for a long time, was a difficult planet to get to and to land successfully on. And we've had our failures there as well, and so many other nations, specifically the old Soviet Union.

It acquired a reputation as being sort of the Bermuda Triangle of space where spacecraft disappeared, never to be heard from again. But we apparently have licked that problem. And what these little rovers have done is absolutely astonishing.

DAN OLSON: That happened to the Europeans, did it not, fairly recently within the last year or so, one of their Mars probes just went poof?

ROBERT PEPIN: Yes. That was Beagle. The little rover that was dropped and was never heard from again.

DAN OLSON: And we don't know why.

ROBERT PEPIN: We don't know why. Eventually, we may stumble across the remnants of that spacecraft when we are doing a more detailed exploration of the planet.

[CAT STEVENS, "MOONSHADOW"]

Yes, I'm being followed by a moonshadow, moonshadow, moonshadow.

DAN OLSON: Robert Pepin. 34 years ago, the University of Minnesota physicist was in mission control in Houston. He was science advisor then to Apollo Lunar missions 14, 15, 16, and 17.

Just to refresh the memory, mission 14 came after the hair-raising Apollo 13 episode, where problems aboard the spacecraft caused the astronauts to abort a moon landing and cobbled together repairs that would keep them alive and bring the vehicle back to Earth.

Mission 14, by contrast, was ready for prime time. A color television camera on the lunar lander beamed live video of the landing back to viewers on Earth. Here's more of the conversation with Robert Pepin.

ROBERT PEPIN: I was really only asked to do one thing in those four missions. It was my responsibility to decide on various alternative routes of action when the astronauts were doing certain things on the surface. And I was really never called on because everything went according to plan, with one exception.

On Apollo 15, the first mission in which we attempted to drill into the lunar surface went down about 3 or 4 meters and the drill apparatus got stuck, and they couldn't get it out. And I was asked whether or not they should continue to try to get this drill core out or whether they should abandon it and go on to another part of the mission.

A part of the mission, by the way, that was designed by one of the astronauts that was getting the drill core out and he desperately wanted to go on that. And so I, with some encouragement from my colleagues, decided that it was really important to get that drill core out. And they worked very hard at it. And they finally got it out. And it turned out to be a very important sample.

The astronaut, Dave Scott, whose mission to his own little crater was abrogated by that decision, came back in not a very good mood. But the folks at the Johnson Space Center lunar curatorial facility took X-rays of that core, showed what it actually told us about layering and geological processes on the moon. And he became a convert and went all over the country talking about his drill core.

The other thing that was kind of amusing that happened in that episode is that Dave and his colleague worked so hard in getting that out of the surface that they went into heart arrhythmia. The astronauts' physicians were very concerned about this and so on the next mission, Apollo 16, they decided that the problem was deficit in the potassium, in their diet. And so on the next mission, they spiked their orange juice with potassium salts, which made it taste rather strange.

And one famous incident where the two astronauts on the lunar lander were discussing how the orange juice tasted. They were discussing it into an open microphone, which they did not realize was open on a communications link. Fortunately, not to the world at large but to the Johnson Space Center. And what they said about orange juice and what they said about orange juice, I can't repeat here--

[LAUGHTER]

--but let us say that I don't think either of them has ever had a glass of orange juice since they came back.

DAN OLSON: Oh, the sacrifices for science in here. So, I mean, did you have a sense when you were sitting watching those panels and the display monitors and hearing the talk back and forth to the moon, was there a sense that anything could happen at any time, including the mission literally going up in smoke, the explorers, the astronauts dying for the sake of the science? What was it like?

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, that was always in the back of everyone's mind because it's an extremely dangerous undertaking, as was evidenced by Apollo 13, which never made it, but got safely back. These astronauts were very interesting people, with only one exception.

Through the whole course of the Apollo mission, they were-- essentially, all people who had flown airplanes or flown jets for the military. And they converted to being scientific explorers in various ways, some quite successfully. Dave Scott was a very good example of that, some not so successfully.

The one scientist we sent to the moon was the last mission, Apollo 17, Jack Schmitt, who's now a professor over at the University of Wisconsin. And he was a geologist and had to learn to fly a jet plane before they would take him. He was a very loquacious guy.

And Jack was never at a loss for something to say until the famous instance when he stepped out for the first time on the lunar surface. And what he was supposed to do was look around and give us the geologist's perspective on what he was seeing since he was the first genuine geologist that we had sent there, and the last, it turned out.

And Jack was awestruck and wouldn't say a word. He was just looking around. And finally, his colleague on the surface has said something like, Jack, aren't you supposed to say something? [LAUGHS] And from that on, Jack usually is quite loquacious and it was very valuable to have him on the moon.

DAN OLSON: Right. So the human dynamics were probably every bit as volatile as we've been led to believe on the Hollywood silver screen with some of these missions, maybe more so. We'll probably never hear some of the better details, including the potassium-orange story.

ROBERT PEPIN: No, no. You won't hear many of the details. In those days, I was sort of an honorary part of what was called the surface working group. And we would go out, me as an honorary geologist-- by the way, I have a signed certificate from the head of the geology team for lunar surface operations that I had not the slightest talent in geology, mostly because I could get lost inside a rock.

That team would search for places in the United States that had a topography and a-- shall we say, a morphology that resembled as closely as we could the surface of the moon, the conditions under which they'd be working there. And one of the places I remember going was in Northern Nevada, in the China Lake military reservation, which in fact, when you step out of the Jeep and look at it, it does look like the surface of the moon. There's not a single thing growing there.

And they would have a little terrestrial version of the rover and they'd run around and they'd practice picking up samples and putting them in bags and doing all sorts of things. And I would just observe and be rescued from doing stupid things by the geologists. It was a very interesting experience though, and I enjoyed it immensely.

DAN OLSON: Did you at various points along the way, either seriously or flippantly just kind of itch and say out loud, darn it, why didn't they send me to the moon? At least I'd know what to do and what I'm looking for.

ROBERT PEPIN: Oh, I don't know what we would have done up there. I certainly would have gone over the protests of my wife. But I probably didn't have the talent to learn how to fly a jet plane. In fact, it would have terrified me much more than going to the moon.

I think they struck a very good balance. They took some wonderful physical specimens. Neil Armstrong, I think, was one of the greatest. They had an apparatus in Houston where the astronauts would practice landing on the moon.

And it was a little hovercraft with huge fans in the bottom of it. And they would practice rising vertically and then settling down gently. And it turned out that this apparatus was highly unstable and was likely to flip over. And Neil Armstrong was one of the only people who really mastered that. He had reflexes that one would not believe.

So I think they-- and believe me, I would have been crushed into purple paste [CHUCKLES] underneath that thing if I've been called on to react as quickly as he did. They sent very well-trained physical specimens from among the military corps.

Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining

Shine on the one that's gone and been untrue.

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota physicist, Robert Pepin. This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Pepin says life in space exploration has rewarded him with thrilling insights and crushing disappointments. One satisfying moment was acquiring a valuable piece of a meteorite. One of the more famous meteorites of our time was found by an Anoka homeowner. We'll hear Pepin's recollection of that incident.

What at first appeared to be a crushing disappointment happened more recently. One of Pepin's experiments was aboard the US mission headed toward the sun. It crashed when it came back to Earth. Here's more of the conversation with Robert Pepin.

Folks get very excited about meteorites. Do you still get calls pretty routinely from sheriffs, deputies, landowners, and others around the world saying, Dr. Pepin, I have something here that I know you're going to be interested?

ROBERT PEPIN: I'd say about 10 or 20 a year. Now, among my many talents [CHUCKLES] is a complete inability to recognize from a piece of rock whether or not it's a meteorite.

DAN OLSON: Seriously, but you're the trained eyes. So you think even those of us who are--

ROBERT PEPIN: Remember, I'm not a geologist. And fortunately, I have a colleague over in the geology department, Professor Calvin Alexander, who really is an expert on looking at a specimen and assessing quite accurately whether or not it could be meteoritic.

He tells me that-- and so what I do when I get these telephone calls is I immediately refer them to him. And then if something looks promising, they can come back to us for some simple mass spectrometric measurements, which will tell unambiguously whether it's a meteorite or not.

The one success we've had was about five or six years ago when a chap reported that he had found about 10 years earlier a very strange object that he had unearthed while he was backhoeing a sewer outlet in his home, a sewer service connection to the street.

And he dug this big channel. They laid the pipe, filled it in. The next spring he went out and he noticed this little thing poking up above the surface of the-- and he said, that's ugly. And so he got his backhoe and unearthed this thing. And it turned out to be a hunk of iron that weighed about 120 pounds. And he used it for a doorstop for the next 10 years.

And finally, a friend of his persuaded him that he probably-- it was a very peculiar looking thing and probably he should make some attempt to find out what it was. And so he contacted me and Professor Alexander and was persuaded to saw off a little piece of it, which cost him three hacksaw blades because it turned out to be an iron meteorite and they're incredibly tough.

So he brought a little piece in and we looked at it and said, boy, that looks promising. So I did some studies here with the mass spectrometer and it was a meteorite. It's now called the Anoka 2 meteorite.

And it turns out to be another piece of another meteorite discovered in Anoka County many years ago. And this meteorite apparently fragmented in the upper atmosphere and had landed in several pieces. And there are probably more pieces of it out there. So people continue to look.

DAN OLSON: This is going to set off a race now. We're going to have to censor this for broadcast because I'm told that these pieces of rock are really quite extraordinarily valuable, is that so?

ROBERT PEPIN: They are for scientific reasons. And this particular one was such a lovely specimen that it was carved up after he sold it to a consortium of museums and universities, of which we were one, and it was sawed into several spectacular-looking pieces, one of which is over here in the geology collection.

And so primarily, it's being used now for display. Gorgeous looking. He sold it to the consortium for $35,000. So they do have a value. And in this particular case, since we had another piece of it from the earlier discovery, most of the interest in it was a spectacular display of a cut and polished surface of a visitor from the asteroid belt.

DAN OLSON: Well, military considerations grow to be the dominant factor. Do you think in near-term exploration just in years out here and also in relation-- well, for example, military colonization of the moon and near space here, the Earth's atmosphere?

ROBERT PEPIN: I sort of doubt that. That was a great fear in the early part of the program when one was talking about, oh, can we set up missile bases in orbit, and would the moon be an appropriate place to launch strikes against other nations? That talk is largely disappeared now.

How it will re-emerge in the face of what is now popularly called the terrorist threat is a little difficult to assess. I doubt very much, though, whether any talk of manned orbital missile firing platforms in space will emerge seriously in any of the discussions about Homeland Security.

What has happened now actually is something quite different. It's a coordination and cooperation between the military and the civilian space science program. You asked earlier about water on the moon. Our primary evidence for that, except for theoretical considerations, comes from a joint Department of Defense and NASA project called the Clementine mission, which was really a DOD testbed.

But they opened it up to scientific instruments and it turned out to be an extremely profitable coordination between the two. I see that to the extent where the goals of the two government agencies coincide as something that will probably happen again.

DAN OLSON: Various elected officials want the private sector to play a larger role in space exploration for presumably commercial purposes and whatever that may amount to. What's your prediction there?

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, I think generally it's a good thing. The privatization, for example, of launch vehicles, they're extremely expensive. There is one thing you can say about a competitive financial capitalistic environment is that if there is a market for something, you will eventually drive the price down in a competitive way to a point which is probably considerably less than the specialized organizations that currently build these things only for NASA and the military.

There are going to be problems along the way, however. They build these instruments with a lot of care, which is one of the reasons why they're so expensive and with a very high degree of reliability.

Now, having said that, there have been some enormous blunders [CLEARS THROAT] in designing spacecraft in this context, such things as what seem now to be ridiculous confusion between the English and metric system of units. The recent Genesis crash, for example, the spacecraft in Utah, in which I have a very strong vested interest.

DAN OLSON: Let's just pause there. You had a piece of something on that spacecraft-- gold foil.

ROBERT PEPIN: The idea of the--

DAN OLSON: The parachutes didn't jettison.

ROBERT PEPIN: The parachutes didn't jettison. And it was traced to a mistake in the blueprints where the accelerometer that was supposed to sense the deceleration of the spacecraft in the upper atmosphere was installed upside down. And so it never was able to sense the fact that the spacecraft had entered the atmosphere was being braked by atmospheric resistance.

And that was supposed to send a signal that, hey, we're in the atmosphere, let's deploy the parachute and slow us down. And of course, that signal was never sent because the accelerometer was not working.

DAN OLSON: Particles from the sun, is that what you were interested in collecting on your plate of metal? And what's the update?

ROBERT PEPIN: This was a very interesting mission. It was designed to go out and spent a couple of years-- about 2 million kilometers sunward of the Earth to collect a sample of the solar wind, which is actually a sample from the surface of the sun which reflects the composition of the sun, which we now believe and probably with very good reason, represents the composition of the starting swirl of dust and gas from which the solar system initially formed.

And the reason it's important is because many of the more subtle elements, those of low abundance in the solar wind, their composition is not known very well. And that means that we don't know in these particular instances what the composition of the starting material for the whole solar system was. And so the objective was to get a good reading on the initial composition of this swirling mass of dust and gas that eventually coalesced to form the sun and the solar system.

Our experiment was a simple piece of gold foil which was deployed on the spacecraft facing the sun. And these little particles of solar wind, which are zipping out through the solar system at 200 or 300 miles an hour-- miles a second-- I'm sorry, not miles an hour, are going so fast that when they hit something like this gold foil, they embed themselves in the foil and stick there and even a shock as severe as the crash of the spacecraft would not have dislodged them.

So we were listening in real-time as Genesis came in and made a big splash. We were very sad at that particular time. It later turned out that much of the science for that mission can actually be recovered. It's true that many of the collectors are in pieces now, but we can work just as well with the pieces as we could with the original intact collectors.

And by some miracle, the thing that survived best on the entire spacecraft among the scientific collectors was what is called the Minnesota gold foil, which looks after impact almost exactly the way it looked on launch. And right now it's down at the Johnson Space Center being cleaned up because there's a certain amount of Utah spread around the surface of it.

[CLEARS THROAT]

And within a month or a couple of months, I think we'll have the samples back here and we can go ahead with our experiments. So an incredible piece of good fortune.

[RICHARD STRAUSS, "ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA"]

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota physics Professor Robert Pepin. He was the science advisor for four Apollo Lunar missions in the 1970s. He's a widely consulted expert on the origin of the moon and Mars and on meteorites.

Robert Pepin's educational background includes being a student in a one room school in a Canadian lobster fishing village, a bachelor's degree from Harvard, and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. For 15 years, he's directed the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology Honors Program.

There's still much to be discovered about the universe. Pepin views with skepticism the current interest in using creative design to explain cosmic questions. Here's the final portion of my conversation with Robert Pepin.

How does this square with people who say, well, Dr. Pepin, what's behind the physics of the universe is intelligent design? And how does that square with whatever theological or religious beliefs you may hold as a scientist?

ROBERT PEPIN: Many scientists in looking at the cosmos and the wonderful intricacies of everything from biological systems to the galaxies and to the cosmos itself, I don't think anyone will say that they understand how this could have happened starting from an agglomeration of hydrogen, helium, and dust, that, in fact, there is a design whose origin we do not know that does in some respect lie behind the cosmos as we see it now.

That is not a religious statement. That's essentially a statement of our ignorance on how such a master blueprint could have come into existence and we simply don't know. It's a metaphysical, it's a philosophical question. It is, in many respects, not a religious question.

The problem of the so-called conflict between science and religion now is really a dispute between people who take their religion, particularly the Bible, literally, and those who regard the Bible as a statement of philosophical and moral precepts.

And the danger, I think, in intelligent design and creationism is that it will gradually work its way into the educational curriculum and produce generations of students, potential scientists, whose minds are not as free to range over the whole gamut, the whole sweep of possibilities as has been in the past.

DAN OLSON: Native of Eastern Canada, is that where you were born and raised?

ROBERT PEPIN: I was born in Massachusetts. And at the tender age of 1 and 1/2, not of my own volition, my father had died unexpectedly and the family was moved to Eastern Canada. And I was raised there, left again, again, not of my own volition at the age of 13, and moved to just outside New York City. That was a cultural shock.

DAN OLSON: What was the shock?

ROBERT PEPIN: From a lobster fishing village of 300 people in Eastern Canada where the nearest large city, which was 60,000 people, was 30 miles away, and where I was raised in a one-room schoolhouse environment for the first six grades by a teacher who had taught three generations of my family.

She started teaching at 18 and retired at 94. She was also the lighthouse keeper. And in her 90s, she would climb down an iron ladder, walk to the end of the pier, hoist the kerosene lantern with the red shield on it in the evening, and then the next morning would do the same thing on her way to school and take it out. Wonderful, wonderful person.

So from that environment, I suddenly was transposed to the environs of New York City and it was different.

[LAUGHTER]

DAN OLSON: Talk about a cultural shock, I mean, there you were in that one kind of one-room school environment. Now, are you holding on to beliefs that, yes, there was something especially educationally valuable about that environment compared to later years?

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, it's hard to say. I think the environment that I had in those first five or six years of schooling was wonderful because there was a great deal of individual attention. The marvelous, wonderful school teacher, who I just spoke about, taught all 12 grades. And in one room where grades 1 through 6 and in the other room were grades 7 through 12.

And I think when I was a student, there were perhaps 10 other people in the grades 1 through 6. And we got lots of individual attention. We're trained to do things.

You mentioned earlier that you admired my handwriting. Well, whatever admiration you have for my handwriting comes from the lessons in calligraphy that we were taught in those early years. Actually, looking back on it, I have a very good education.

I remember coming to New York and I originally would have gone into the sixth grade, but both my sister and I, who were classmates in Canada, skipped a grade ahead and went into seventh grade. And it's hard to compare the two systems because I never went through the Canadian grade 7 through 12. And certainly there were many opportunities that one had in a larger educational environment in New York than it would have been available in this little town in Eastern Canada.

DAN OLSON: Were you a pretty bright kid?

ROBERT PEPIN: Reasonably so. It depends on who you ask.

[LAUGHTER]

DAN OLSON: Were you a free spirit? Were you always asking questions?

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, I was asking questions. Free spirit, never could make up my mind what I wanted to do. In the later years of high school, I thought that science was pretty neat, science and mathematics.

Then I went to college and decided that what I really wanted to do was to be a major in English literature. And so I spent two years doing that. I discovered I didn't have the slightest bit of talent, no ability to earn a living in that area. So I went back to physics and I graduated in so-called physicist from college.

I went to graduate school. I discovered there were a lot of physics that I should have taken at the undergraduate level that I had never taken. So my first year of graduate school was sitting with a bunch of undergraduates making up deficiencies.

Then I joined a research group in atomic physics. I thought that was pretty neat. I spent a year at that. And then the old family wanderlust hit. I come from a family on my mother's side of seafarers.

[CHUCKLES]

On my mother's side, the folks who founded that village in the late 1780s and '90s, turned out to be Tory English who were driven out of Massachusetts and New England by the successful revolutionaries who didn't want any Tories around.

And so they migrated East and settled this little village and became shipbuilders. My family became shipbuilders and essentially whalers and this sort of thing. And we had a couple of captains and ship chandlers and that sort of thing in the family.

So for some reason, after our first year of graduate school, I suddenly discovered that what I really wanted to do was go to sea. It was possible in those days and in fact, now is to do this in a scientific context. So I became an oceanographer, working out of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in Southern California, in La Jolla.

And I spent the next three years going all over the Pacific Ocean doing science and having just a wonderful time all the way from just North of Antarctica, where the seas are so rough that you have both feet in one hand for yourself and the other hand for whatever science you think you can do up into the Bering Sea.

Well, it turned out that about the time I got back to Berkeley, research on meteorites was becoming a very big thing. And one of the leaders was at Berkeley named John Reynolds. And I went to a seminar that he was giving while I was presumably working on my master's degree. And the idea was I'd skedaddle back to oceanography, and I was totally fascinated by what he said.

So all of a sudden, instantly, I was no longer an oceanographer, I was a space physicist. And I spent three or four years there finishing up my PhD. Al Nier, whom I spoke of earlier, was also very deep into space physics and meteorite research at that time, so I applied for a job here.

And he wrote me a letter saying, oh, I'm not sure we have an opening. And then he wrote me another letter saying, hey, we have an opening, why don't you come? So I came here in 1965, which is I guess just 40 years ago.

And I have been here ever since, except for a three-year leave of absence in the 1970s where I left to become director of the Lunar Science Institute in Houston. I spent three years doing that. It was wonderful fun. I practiced being an administrator, never very good at it. After three years, I came back here, and I've been here ever since.

DAN OLSON: You managed to land for most of your professional life in an area of the North American continent about as far away from the ocean as one can find oneself. Don't you miss the ocean?

ROBERT PEPIN: I miss the ocean terribly. I go back almost every year to the East Coast. And in fact, last summer I went back to my little village, which is now 400 people, not 200 people. So it's grown enormously.

And I must admit it looks much neater now than it did then. But they're still lobster fishermen and scallop fishermen and it's crammed with my relatives. Everybody there lives to be 95. [CLEARS THROAT] There must be something about the air.

And the first thing I do is when I get within range of the ocean is lick my lips and I can taste the salt-- and that you don't get here. I somehow have managed to settle in that part of the North American continent which I think is most remote from salt water.

DAN OLSON: You probably get some pretty good math training in the elementary years in that one-room school from that teacher. And I don't know how our American students these days stacking up in your opinion as they try to prepare themselves for some of them for the kind of work that you do.

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, the best of the American students are fully competitive with anything in the world. And I have a particular insight in that because among other things here, I direct the Institute of Technology's Honors Program. And I have the extreme pleasure of working every year with the 100 best students who, in my opinion, are the 100 best entering the University of Minnesota system.

And those folks are good. Certainly better than I was and better prepared than I was in math and science when I was at a comparable stage. And these folks just blossom in this environment. They become engineers, they become scientists, they become mathematicians. They go on to wonderful graduate school.

And let's see, I've held that position now for 15 years. And so some of the graduates of the program are now professors themselves. I think what you're probably referring to is American students en masse and their ranking in terms of assessments of science and mathematical proficiency compared with the rest of the world. And there we are definitely behind.

As I say, our best, our comparable to anyone's best. And it is those best that are going to provide the background for this country's technological force in the future. What we wish is that there were more interest and more activity in the K to 12 environment which better prepared the students for careers in science and mathematics.

There are a number of reasons why I think that's sagged off. One is cultural. It has always been true in this country and continues to be true that there is something in the K to 12 experience which deflects women away from science and mathematical and engineering careers.

About 25% of our incoming class in the IT Honors Program is female, which is actually rather good compared with statistics as a whole for the college, but it's not high enough. And there is something in the experience in the K to 12 system which deflects women away from these careers. And it's too bad because when they do in fact become devoted to science and engineering and mathematics, they are some of our best.

The other reason I think is the fact that our school system is just plain underfunded. And so in an environment where you have 30 or 40 students in a particular class with one teacher, students from a great variety of ethnic, cultural, and preparatory backgrounds, it's really tough to get the kind of one-on-one experience, which I had both in Canada and in this wonderful high school in Oyster Bay outside New York City on Long Island, where there was a great deal of hands-on attention.

And so when a spark of interest in science or math or engineering developed, there was someone there to encourage it, not necessarily just in the classroom but in other ways as well. I suspect our school system is too strained, too overcrowded, and too underfunded to actually accept a rather rare cases to permit this kind of inculcation of this kind of interest in a way that will allow people to blossom through both the K to 12 system and in college.

But even with that, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew what I was interested in, but you are presented with so many opportunities here and then and things that interest you that there is some danger of in fact becoming a dilettante and spreading yourself a bit too thinly. And that actually almost happened to me.

And it was only my discovery, which was not mine, it was actually sort of gently hinted to me by my instructors in college that possibly you ought to look for a new discipline because I'm not sure you're going to make it in this one. You have a certain rudimentary talent, but when you're in the humanities and liberal arts, English literature, my creative writing style was not very good.

In fact, I was once told in a scientific paper that was reviewed by a colleague in Switzerland that I was the only person he knew, including Germans, who could write one sentence that was seven lines long--

[LAUGHTER]

--using colons, dashes, semicolons, but never a period. And I think my English teachers in college were quite correct in saying, well, you lack a certain stylistic talent that would probably be necessary if you'd like to pursue a career in the humanities. On the other hand, I know how to write equations.

[LAUGHTER]

It seemed to me to be quite a lot simpler. So I went back to physics and had enormous fun. I've actually had a wonderful career doing things that interest me and getting involved in all sorts of things, some of which I've done well in, some of which I've not done well in, but all adding up to a sort of an interesting life experience.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Robert Pepin, thanks so much for your time, and a pleasure to talk with you.

ROBERT PEPIN: Well, wonderful to talk with you, Dan.

[ELLA FITZGERALD, "BLUE MOON"]

Blue moon

DAN OLSON: Robert Pepin has been a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota since 1965. You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

GARY EICHTEN: And that does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hope you can join us tomorrow. Among other things, a new American RadioWorks report, this one on African American speeches.