Swiss Review 3/2019

Swiss Review / May 2019 / No.3 7 they recount their experiences and talk their way through a series of pho- tos. In these pictures, youngmenwith dated haircuts are busying around a solar wind simulator. These were the Berne scientists. Experimental physi- cist Meister helped to develop the SWC. Professor Bochsler was not yet directly involved at that stage, but would later succeed Johannes Geiss by becoming the Institute’s co-director. Geiss himself is now over 90 and has retired from public life. Meister and Bochsler walk into a windowless laboratory teeming with devices on the basement floor of the Institute. The SWC (the reserve sail, to be precise) stands in themiddle of the room, glittering in the lamplight. Meister and Bochsler greet it almost as they would an old friend. Meister gives a little demonstration, showing how a preloaded spring draws the foil up. “Just like a roller blind.” “Incredibly good and simple” You rolled out a sheet of aluminium foil on the moon to catch the solar wind. Then you rolled it up again. “It was an incredibly good and simple idea,” says Meister. Solar wind parti- cles travelling at speeds of several hundreds of kilometres per second – much slower than light – collide with the foil and are collected there. By melting the foil back in the laboratory, you could ascertain howmany of each type of particle were captured. Everything on the SWC had to be designed for it to be easy to use and to work perfectly. The upright – a tele- scopic tube with ultra-fine threads – stretched the ingenuity of the univer- sity’s engineers to its limits. Then you had the roller that was hidden in the upright until it was time to pull it out. Finally, you had the foil itself, rein- forced with Teflon tape to prevent tearing. “The weight specification of one poundwas quite a headache,” says Meister. “Everythingwould have been a lot easier had the desired weight been one kilogram.” NASA left nothing to chance and instructed astronaut Don Lind to test the device in Berne. Unlike the physi- cists and engineers, Lind employed a spaceman’s perspective. He knew what you could and could not hold on to with those big unwieldy gloves. Meister: “Lind gave us a multitude of instructions, whichwe painstakingly followed.” For example, certain sec- tions of the upright were roughened for gripping purposes, while key com- ponents were coloured red. “But he loved the contraption – just as if it were a big toy.” Why Berne? But how did the only non-US experi- ment of the Apollo 11 mission origi- nate in Berne of all places? “It was no coincidence,” says Bochsler. The Uni- versity of Berne had previously made a name for itself through its research intometeorites. This opened the door to possible experiments involving lu- nar rocks. In addition, Professor Geiss knewmany of theNASA scientists and, according to Bochsler, “showed great skill and determination” in develop- ing relations with NASA. It was Jürg Meister who took the solar sail to the USA in his hand lug- gage. Meister was able to watch the lu- nar rocket taking off on three later missions – from a viewing point one and a half kilometres away. “It was an incredible and remarkably loud expe- rience. The low frequencies reverber- ated in my stomach. My shirt on my skin quivered. It sounded like a huge pan full of sizzling eggs.” It was 3 a.m. in Switzerland when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. The team in Berne followed the event live on television at the Institute. “I wasn’t worried,” says Meister. “We had tested the sail hun- dreds of times, so I knew it would workwithout a problem.” Bochsler, on the other hand, was simply hoping the guys would “get back down in one piece”. Jürg Meister lives near Thun now- adays. After leaving the University of Berne, the young physics doctor spent time in Texas analysing data from a different Apollo experiment. On his return to Switzerland, heworked at an armament factory in Thun and spe- cialised in armour-piercing ammuni- tion. He continues to be fascinated by all things that fly, although aircraft and rockets are no longer his primary preoccupation. He and his wife breed butterflies. And every time he looks at the moon, he remembers he held five uprights in his hand that are still on the lunar surface. “Remarkable, don’t you think?” Peter Bochsler’s travels took him to Israel. He found the USA less appealing. “Not least because of America’s involve- ment intheVietnamWar”. After return- ing to Berne, he continued his research into solar winds. Later measurements takenbyspaceprobes confirmedthe re- sults of the Apollo experiments. Better understanding of the Big Bang What did scientists learn from the Solar Wind Composition Experi- ment? Bochsler says it was the first- Astronaut Buzz Aldrin planted the Bernese solar sail on the moon – before un- furling the American flag. Photo: Keystone