Katherine Wright
8 dispatches · Potrillo Volcanic Field
For This Astronaut, Taking a Hike Was a Blast
NASA astronaut Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore volunteered for six days in the New Mexico desert with the RIS4E team, trading his Johnson Space Center office for Kilbourne Hole’s scorching volcanic terrain. A veteran of two space missions, Wilmore directed simulated moonwalks and helped test geology instruments, laying groundwork for a planetary surface mission he knew he would never take himself.
Read‘Contact’ in Real Life: Dishes in the Desert
The Very Large Array in New Mexico’s Plains of San Agustin, made famous by the 1997 film ‘Contact,’ pointed its 27 antenna dishes toward deep space long before Hollywood arrived. The RIS4E team’s 2017 New Mexico expedition offered a close look at a telescope that doubled as a time machine, capturing radio signals from galaxies more than 12 billion light years away.
Read(16,000 Years) After the Volcano: Data Mining at Kilbourne Hole
In June 2017, NASA’s RIS4E team spent three days at Kilbourne Hole, a 300-foot-deep maar crater in southern New Mexico, testing five geology instruments in simulated spacewalks alongside astronaut Butch Wilmore. The team probed the crater’s thin ash layers and ancient lava to see whether portable, in-situ devices could extract the information scientists would otherwise need to carry home in a sample bag.
ReadFinding Energy in the Moon
Solar radiation bombards the Moon’s surface so relentlessly that helium-3, a potential fusion fuel, becomes trapped inside lunar soil grains. Kate Burgess, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory and a member of RIS4E’s Theme 4 team, used a transmission electron microscope to image Apollo 17 samples and, for the first time, directly located the helium inside individual mineral grains, pointing toward methods for extracting it.
ReadMeet the RIS4E Team—And Their Hats
In the blazing New Mexico desert, safety vests made RIS4E scientists nearly indistinguishable, except for their hats. The headgear worn during the team’s 10-day field test at Kilbourne Hole in June 2017 turned out to be more than sun protection: each hat carried a story about the person beneath it, from Jake Bleacher’s legendary black leather cowboy hat to astronaut Butch Wilmore’s Australian Outback-style replacement.
ReadDay 1: Water Wasn’t Enough
The opening day of fieldwork at Kilbourne Hole in June 2017 pushed the RIS4E team to its limits. Temperatures reached 105 degrees, instruments cut out mid-measurement, boot soles melted, and one journalist covering the expedition was carried off the crater floor with heat exhaustion after six hours in the desert sun.
ReadDay 3: Keeping Everything Cool
When 105-degree heat crippled instruments and melted boot soles on the RIS4E team’s first day at Kilbourne Hole, the researchers improvised. Space blankets, ice-filled coolers, a Walmart gazebo, and doubled water rations became the unglamorous tools of planetary science, keeping people and instruments functional enough to return to the desert.
ReadDay 5: Three Generations of Thomas, and Harrison Schmitt
When Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt visited the RIS4E team at Kilbourne Hole in June 2017, reporter Katherine Wright seized a moment to ask him how closely the crater resembles the Moon. His answer, ‘nothing like it, but great training,’ sparked a family discovery: her father and grandfather had met Schmitt in London in 1974, when he lectured on lunar geology.
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