New Mexico, White Sands - Friday, May 1, 2015 - White Sands Missile Range Museum and White Sands National Monument

What a great day for a day trip, temps in the high 80s with lots of sunshine.  About an hour or so from the resort where we are staying.

 

 

Our first stop was the White Sands Missile Range Museum.  At the close of WWII White Sands Proving Ground was established to test the emerging rocket technology.  Since 1945 the missile range has conducted more than 42,000 missile and rocket firings.  The literature on the range says that once or twice a week when missiles are being fired Highway 70 will be closed for an hour or so.  Thank goodness we missed that, it got really hot when we weren’t moving.

The museum is located on an Army installation, but it is open to the public and admission is free.  You do have to show your driver’s license, vehicle registration and proof of insurance for the vehicle.  They say there is RV parking, but it looked pretty tight to me.

Inside the museum we spotted this mosaic of the “Missing Man Table” I thought our fellow Rolling Thunder members would appreciate.

This Darth Vader helmet was given to the museum by Ben Burtt of Lucas films.  He visited the range twice in 1978 to collect sounds of various missiles being test fired.  Many of those sounds were used in the movie “Star Wars”.

In the 1960’s the Missile Dogs of White Sands were much more efficient at finding fallen missile pieces than humans or instruments.  Before firing the missile, parts were coated with shark liver oil which couldn’t be smelled by humans but the dogs picked up on it right away.  They could usually find the missile pieces within an hour.

 

 

On March 30, 1982 NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia landed at White Sands Missile Range because of flooding at the Shuttle’s original landing site, Edwards Air Force Base, CA.  The scheduled landing was to be the day before but the worst wind and sand storm in 25 years came through the area and delayed the landing a day.

This is a 1/3 scale model of the first nuclear device as it looked fully assembled and sitting atop the 100 foot tower at ground zero, Trinity Site, which is here at White Sands.

Anyone remember using one of these in high school business classes?  Monroe desk calculator.

Lots of missiles are located inside the museum.

This one is a BGM-71 TOW.  Its first use on helicopters was on 5-2-72 when U.S. Army UH-1 Hueys destroyed North Vietnamese tanks near Am Loc.

There was a separate building outside housing a V-2 rocket that had been refurbished in Hutchison, Kansas.  Unfortunately, my picture of it is blurry.  The V-2 rockets were developed by the Germans.  At the end of WWI German military buildup was limited by the Versailles Treaty.  But rockets weren’t covered by that treaty so Germany went in search of brilliant scientists and engineers who would devote their time to rocket development, the first successful flight of the V-2 was in 1942.

By 1945 Germany had been defeated and Germany’s main scientist on the V-2 program and his crew of nearly 100 scientists and engineers decided to surrender to the United States rather than other allies because they thought they would be treated better.

300 train cars of V-2 parts were shipped to White Sands and the Navy started participating in the V-2 testing program.

Sign at the entrance to the outside display.  I’m not sure what rattlesnake protocol is – do you stand still, move away slowly or run like the wind? (in my case I only have to run faster than Greg).

 

 

Lots of different missiles outside.

 

I recognized the name of this Patriot Missile.  It was first fired in 1970.  It was developed as a defense against high performance aircraft.

 

 

Note:  There is no white sand here that we could see.

I am so glad we decided to go another 30 miles to the White Sands National Monument.  This is part of the National Park Program so we got in free with our Senior Pass.

This is what the desert looks like leading up to the White Sands National Monument.

 

 

Then it turns to this, looking like snow drifts in the desert.  At one point one of the sand dunes was beginning to encroach on the road, Highway 70.

 

 

The visitor’s center had a short movie explaining how the dunes have developed.

The Tularosa Basin is a mountain-ringed valley at the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert.  The eroding mountains around the basin fill it with sediment including the gypsum that forms the white sands.  This basin is like a bathtub with no drain so rainfall during the monsoon season is trapped in the lowest point of the basin – Lake Lucero and the Alkali Flat.  When the water evaporates beds of selenite crystals are formed like these.

Freezing and thawing, wetting and drying eventually break down the crystals into particles that are light enough to be moved by the wind.  As the particles continue to be blown by the wind they get smaller and smaller until they are nearly as fine as talcum powder.

As the winds continue to blow the newer dunes can move 12-15 feet a year.  Older dunes with developed plant life move at a slower rate of just a few inches a year.  Only a few plant can grow rapidly enough to survive being buried in the moving dunes.  One of them is the Yucca plant.  10 feet of the plant might be visible above the dunes, but the roots will go another 30 below the surface to reach water.  However, when the dunes move away from the plant it can’t support this tall stem so the plant dies.

 

 

 

The Sumac plant roots bring water from the ground and use the soft gypsum sand to create an almost concrete like foundation for its plant.

 

 

The great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert here and have created the largest gypsum dune field in the world.

 

 

 

The animal life here has evolved to white versions of their former selves.  We saw a lizard that was white, with just a little turquoise showing on its tail.  However, it moved too fast for me to get a picture.

 

We hiked up one of the dunes.  That is the bike below us.  This picture is as it was taken, no editing.  We estimate we were 20-30 feet up.

At the top of the dune I wrote “5-1-15 Jones”.  I’m sure it was gone by the time we made it back to the visitor’s center.