Updated:
Save
Some Spaniards ‘inhabit’ our satellite despite the fact that they never set foot on the Moon. Among them are the astronomer Caius Julius Hyginus (64 a. De C.-17), un liberto del Emperor Augustus who was born in what is now Valencia and who was a librarian at the Palatine Library as well as the author of an important compilation work on the constellations. For all his scientific work -since 1935- a selenite fissure of more than 200 kilometers in length bears his name.
The King Alfonso X the Wise (1221-1284) also has its lunar corner, the fundamental reason being that he was the author of ‘Astronomy knowledge books‘ where he collected knowledge from scientific, Arabic and Jewish texts.
A 41 kilometer diameter crater is named ‘Isidorus’ after Saint Isidore of Seville (556-636), the author of the famous ‘Etymologies’, a series of books in which he brought together all the knowledge – both religious and secular – of the time.
Our Nobel Prize Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), the father of the neural theory, also ‘owns’ a nine kilometer lunar crater that was named ‘Cajal’.
Three scientific priests on the moon
It is perhaps less known that three lunar craters bear the name of as many Spanish priests and scientists: Miguel Catalan, Ramon Maria Aller y Lluis Rodés.
Miguel Catalán (1894-1957) belongs to the list of the most outstanding scientists of the Silver Age of Spanish science, who in the thirties of the last century collaborated with the scientific community in establishing the quantum theory.
The Galician priest Ramón María Aller (1878-1966) built an internationally famous astronomical observatory and discovered four stars. This scientist was a pioneer in our country in the study of double and multiple stars, and he is credited with the invention of some measuring devices that were later adopted by the Paris Observatory.
The third priest who forms part of this portentous trio is the Catalan Lluis Rodés (1881-1939), a brilliant astronomer who joined the Ebro Observatory after receiving exquisite training at different American universities. He was a student of electrometeorology and everything related to atmospheric phenomena, which was of great interest to the airlines that were beginning to be born in the Old Continent at that time.
Spanish scientists collaborate with NASA
When the arrival of man on the Moon, on July 16, 1969, is recalled, reference is usually made to the Spanish contribution to NASA’s Apollo program, with explicit references to the space stations of Robledo de Chavela, Fresnedilla y Canary Islands. But, perhaps, very few are those who know the figure of Hermogenes Sanz y Antonio Travesi.
Hermógenes Sanz was an expert scientist in isotopic geochemistry who in 1966 traveled to the California Institute of Technology –Caltech– to train in isotope analysis. There he participated in the manufacture of a mass spectrometer with a previously unknown precision and with which they studied the moonstones. Hermogenes published, together with other colleagues, in the journal ‘Science’ the first study on the age of lunar rocks (around 4,000 million years).
Antonio Travesí had a somewhat different trajectory, but no less passionate for that. He was a fellow at NASA in 1967 where he worked on the development of neutron activation, which at that time sounded like science fiction, and presented a project for the space agency called ‘Lunar trace elements’, which was accepted by the directors of the POT. Some time later, Travesí determined the trace elements of the lunar samples, one gram of dust and another of rock, obtained by Apollo 11.
Pedro Gargantilla is an internist at El Escorial Hospital (Madrid) and the author of several popular books.
See them
comments