Ronald Scott, 76; Designed Lunar Soil Scoop
Ronald Scott, a Caltech civil engineer who designed a scoop that enabled the unmanned Surveyor 3 to collect soil on the moon, has died. He was 76.
Scott died of cancer Tuesday at his home in Altadena, the university said in a statement.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Aug. 24, 2005 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday August 24, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 45 words Type of Material: Correction
Ronald Scott -- The obituary of Ronald Scott in Monday’s California section said the scoop he developed for Surveyor 3 helped bring the lunar soil it collected to Earth. In fact, the soil was tested on the moon, and resulting data were transmitted to Earth.
As an expert in soil mechanics, Scott was enlisted to help test the lunar surface material prior to the manned Apollo moon landings. His scoop design was incorporated into the Surveyor craft, which landed at Oceanus Procellarum on April 20, 1967.
The material the scoop dug up and helped bring to Earth provided details about the strength, texture and structure of what Neil Armstrong would step onto two years later.
Scott also worked as a consultant for NASA on soil mechanics during the Apollo missions and the unmanned Viking mission to Mars in 1976.
Scott also studied how Earth’s soil behaves during landslides and earthquakes. He was a consultant on the Baldwin Hills Dam failure in 1963 and the Laguna Hills Bluebird Canyon landslide in 1978.
Caltech provost Paul Jennings, a longtime colleague, said in the university’s statement that Scott “was an acknowledged intellectual leader in the field” and helped pioneer the use of centrifuges to study soil mechanics, particularly the effects of earthquakes.
After the San Francisco Bay Area’s Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, Scott told The Times that predicting soil behavior during great temblors was still in its infancy.
“We have no strong-motion records of a greater than magnitude 8 earthquake,” he said then, adding that assuming the ground would act the same in a great quake as in a smaller quake requires “a jump in engineering imagination.”
A native of Scotland, Scott earned a bachelor’s degree at Glasgow University and moved to the United States in 1951 to obtain his master’s degree and doctorate in soil mechanics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After additional research at MIT, he became a soil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers and then with Racey, McCallum and Associates in Canada.
Scott joined the Caltech faculty in 1958 and in 1987 was named the Dottie and Dick Hayman Professor of Engineering. He retired in 1998.
He won the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 1969 and the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize in 1976. Scott was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1974.
He is survived by his wife, Pam, and three sons, Grant, Rod and Craig.
