Lancaster Professor Lionel Wilson was a young researcher when he was asked to be an expert commentator during the BBC’s extended live radio coverage of the first crewed mission to the Moon.

50 years ago, as the Apollo 11 spacecraft made history and the astronaut Neil Amstrong took a giant step for mankind, Lionel Wilson was sitting in a BBC studio 238,900 miles away, talking about the kind of surface Armstrong was walking on.

In 1969 Lionel, now emeritus Professor at the Lancaster Environment Centre, was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of London Observatory in Mill Hill. He had been analysing data collected by the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that had been sent to the Moon during 1966 and 1967 to select landing sites for the Apollo missions.

“My PhD thesis, which I’d completed in 1968, was concerned with understanding the mechanical properties of the surface of the Moon - rather important if you are planning to land a heavy spacecraft on it,” said Lionel.

The Moon’s surface was thought to be covered in a fine powder, and there were concerns that it could be several kilometres thick in some areas. But by 1969, research by Lionel and others suggested that the chosen site would be safe for Apollo 11.

Because of his expertise, Lionel was asked by the BBC to be one of three commentators – alongside BBC science correspondent Arthur Garrett and engineer Eric Burnett - for a special live radio programme broadcasting continuously from before the craft touched down to when it was safely back in orbit.

“It was probably the longest live radio broadcast in history at the time – we were on air for well over 24 hours,” Lionel explains.

“The programme broadcast the exchanges between the astronauts and mission control in Houston: whenever there was a lull in the conversation it was our job to fill the gap, discussing what was happening and giving background information. I’ve been sent a clip by the BBC where I was talking about the origin of the Moon.”

It was exciting, exhausting and nerve wracking in equal measures.

“It did feel like a historic occasion: it was exciting, listening to the new information coming back from the astronauts. Inevitably in the background there was the knowledge that something could go wrong. We all lived with the statistics that there was between a one in ten and a one in 20 chance of any one of the Apollo missions having a problem, though I don’t recall there being any discussion with the BBC about what we do if there was a disaster.

“But we also knew that the astronauts had volunteered for the space programme, and that they felt they were doing something unprecedented, and were prepared to lose their lives doing it.”

Staying alert for all that time wasn’t easy. “I believe I fell asleep for a few seconds at one point, but otherwise we all stayed awake, sustained by supplies of coffee and sandwiches.”

The images and data coming back from the Moon from this and other missions offered new possibilities to a young researcher like Lionel.

“We saw things on the images that looked like the edges of lava flows from ancient volcanos, and it gradually became more and more obvious that’s what they were

“My degree was in physics and I had no background in geology so I went to see George Walker, a British volcanologist. I told him that we’d seen these things that might be lava flows, and that in the Moon’s low gravity with no atmosphere they should be different from the flows on earth. I asked if he could point me to a paper that would give me some information on the physics of lava flows, and he said ‘no, nobody has ever worked on that, you wouldn’t be interested would you?’ In the space of three minutes my entire career changed direction.”

Lionel spent much of the next 50 years building models of volcanic activity, both in space and on earth.

A year after the broadcast Lionel and all his colleagues from the University of London Observatory moved to Lancaster University to form the Lancaster Planetary Science Group.

“We became involved in NASA's lunar sample analysis programme, and we had some lunar rocks and dust on campus for a few months, making measurements of their thermal and light-scattering properties.”

In 1974 he was invited to take part in the analysis of data from the Mariner 10 mission to Mercury, and was then asked to be a visiting professor at both Brown and Hawai’i universities in America, which have close links with NASA. Since then he has been involved in the post-mission analysis programmes of every NASA mission to the silicate planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, our Moon, Mars, and Jupiter's satellite Io - all of which either have had, or currently have, volcanic activity.

“People like me get captivated by other planets but our research has an enormous number of spin offs as well,” Lionel explains.

“My interest in volcanoes in places with less gravity made me go right back to the basic physics of volcanoes. That has led to detailed models of volcanic activity on the Earth, which has increased our knowledge of how high an eruption cloud will go into the atmosphere, and how far and fast lava flows will travel.

“It means we can observe an eruption for a few hours and then predict how far the lava will go and give reliable warnings of whether people need to be evacuated. All of that has come out of getting back to basic physics, prompted by having the planetary experience.”

Although theoretically retired, Lionel is still actively researching, spending a couple of months a year in America, and is again focussing on his first interest.

“The Moon is back at the centre of our attention now. Over last five years there have been more and more missions to the Moon. The quality of the images coming back is fantastic, in particular the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft which is sending back images with better than 1 metre resolution. This enormous stream of data means I’ve done nothing but work on the Moon for last 18 months.”