Clementine was a mission to the moon and then to the asteroid Geographos it
was a concept mission where we were mostly trying to take existing
miniaturized technology and rapidly turn it into a space platform
Frankly none of us was sure what we were getting into this was new territory we'd never done
anything other than Earth orbiting satellites, how you track a satellite out
at those you know distances and all that that was all new stuff.
We had to take basically a concept from a napkin and we had less than two years to design
build integrate test launch and operated mission of such complexity that even if
you took today's technology and tried to accomplish that that type of achievement
it would have been extremely difficult to be able to complete.
It's different than normal schedule pressure when you're going after an asteroid that's
just flying by you know if you're not there that's it you're done there's no
such thing as well give me another week or so mm-hmm can't do.
It was very exciting time leading up to it with all the contingency plannings we had a
very short in relative terms launch window where we had to get off the
ground and on our way or we were not going to be able to get to the asteroid
The command we thought had been sent that would do a certain thing did
something else it opened the valves on the propulsion system and spun the
satellite up and we we used all the remaining fuel. So the Geographos part never happened.
We found a facility a National Guard
Armory that was nothing more than a shell of a building rollup garage doors
oil on the floor and we had to start from scratch in retrofit that whole
building into a state-of-the-art satellite operations facility.
The Batcave got its name it was a Honeywell building and it was a large truck bays.
Bats had taken residence up in that large high bay area where these trucks
were so it got the name the bat cave but it was a cool name for where we were
doing Mission Operations for the Clementine mission.
When we finally got into orbit around the moon and we had gotten confirmation that the satellite
was in fact in orbit around the moon, it's pretty easy to miss it unless you slow
the satellite down just the right amount too much it's not good to littles it's
not good you just skip right on by so we hit it we nailed it we were in a perfect orbit and I couldn't be happier.
We worked 12-hour shifts at the Batcave lots of
times I volunteered to stay on the night shift for doing those mission operations
less dignitaries walking through and able to focus on what was going on with the mission.
We in effect transferred almost two million digital images of the
lunar surface to our ground station and this was not transferred from a low
Earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit but from those those long distances so in
effect it was it was an amazing achievement to be able to transfer
almost two million digital images of the lunar surface.
And, this was kind of the birth of the you know the internet and so that data was streaming on very
little delay it was damn near real-time and people who knew the address could
access it and some of the you know VIPs over in the Pentagon were going gaga
they was sitting there at their terminal, it was great.
Internally and and even externally a lot of people knew it is Clementine because it was gonna follow
the story of of the the song My Darling Clementine and after that it was gonna
do the flyby of Geographos complete its mission and it would have been lost and gone forever.
So where did it endup? It is definitely lost and gone
forever it's in a I think they call it heliocentric orbit the satellite went
past and it's in an orbit similar to that maybe a little outside of it and
there are stories that 15 years after Clementine launched it probably came back past earth again.
It's in this heliocentric orbit, dead as a doornail
but the data that it collected surely lives on.
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