Chris Smith: Look! Up in the sky. It’s a ... what the heck is it?

If my dad were still alive to assist, this column would be a lot better than it’s going to be.

The topic is a smallish object from space that’s right now approaching Earth, though it won’t come close to hitting us, and that has many scientists and sky-watchers wide-eyed and thoroughly intrigued.

There’s a theory that the object is not a naturally occurring asteroid but part of a rocket booster from a long-ago NASA moon mission that preceded the Apollo flights and that most people have forgotten or never knew about. I grew up hearing of the seven unmanned Surveyor landing craft sent rocketing toward the moon between mid-1966 and early 1968.

My father, Donald C. “Dr. Clean” Smith, had the time of his life working on that project as a contamination-control specialist. He took in all seven launches at Florida’s Cape Canaveral, then called Cape Kennedy for the slain president who’d resolved to put a man on the moon before the close of the ’60s.

My dad wasn’t a rocket scientist but a chemist. He’d earned his Ph.D. in 1943 while contributing to the war effort by researching military applications of silicone.

Interesting, to me anyway, is that he was a doctor of chemistry and his only grandchild, my son, is now a doctor of physical therapy. I stand as proof that in between them, the Smith family smart genes took a breather.

Back to the story: My father, Don, worked in Southern California for the Hughes Aircraft Co. It was contracted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, to build the uncrewed Surveyor spaceships designed to land gently on the moon and send back photographs and readings essential for safely planning the manned Apollo missions.

Those were highly exciting and frenetic times. The space race was on.

Early in 1966, the Soviet Union became the first country to achieve a soft landing on the moon, its Luna 9 spacecraft coming to rest near the Reiner and Marius craters in Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms.

“Drat!” people like my father said.

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CLEANLINESS, beyond being next to godliness, is essential to the successful operation of the sensitive electronics and other technology that control a spacecraft. JPL needed somebody to help assure there was no contamination present in the seven Surveyor lunar landers.

Don Smith happily answered the call. He went to Florida in mid-1965 to check out what was in place to assure the hyper cleanliness of the Surveyor probes.

He found two large cleanrooms, one for final spacecraft assembly and testing, the other for launch preparations. “However,” he once told me, “they did not have any personnel or facilities to monitor for contamination or to perform final cleaning of the spacecraft. I wrote a proposal for equipment needed to support the Surveyor program, and JPL agreed to procure same.”

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THE FLAG: My dad returned to Florida in the spring of ’66 and spent nine weeks there ahead of the launch of the first Surveyor on May 30. Less than a week before the big day, he engaged in bit of patriotic mischief.

The night of May 24, the phone rang in his motel room. Hughes Aircraft colleague Sheldon Shallon, chief scientist on the Surveyor project, had a request.

He told Dr. Clean there was nothing on Surveyor 1 to indicate that it was from the United States. Shallon found that unacceptable, and he had a remedy: He’d purchased a 23-cent fabric American flag from Sav-On Drugs and he intended to place it — without the knowledge or permission of NASA/JPL — aboard the spaceship.

Shallon needed someone to clean the flag.

Seeing no harm in the plan, my father agreed to take part. Shallon and a couple of co-conspirators gave him the flag and he removed it from its wooden stick. Then Dr. Smith removed all loose fibers and threads, washed the flag in solvent, rinsed it “in a flowing stream of solvent filtered through a membrane filter at 0.45 microns,” blew it dry with gaseous nitrogen and sealed it in a plastic bag.

I don’t want to brag, but that might have been the cleanest American flag in history.

Hughes engineers Dick Gunter and Ralph Colbert carried it secretly to Surveyor 1 and poked into a small hole in a hollow portion of the spacecraft’s tubular frame. Mission accomplished.

The flag was in its hiding place — and still is, for that matter — as Surveyor 1’s Atlas-Centaur rocket lifted the spacecraft from Cape Kennedy’s Pad 36-A at 7:41:01 a.m. on May 30. The probe touched down sweetly on the surface of the moon 63 hours, 36 minutes later.

Jubilation over a perfect initial mission was quickly tempered for my father and the others on the flag squad when somebody blew the whistle on them. They came clean about the flag. No heads rolled, but word came from high up at Hughes Aircraft that such a thing would never happen again.

My father mentioned to me, “We never did know who squealed.”

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MINUS THE FLAG caper, Surveyor 1, sometimes called Surveyor A, couldn’t have been more successful. Surveyor 2, pretty much the opposite.

It lifted off from Cape Kennedy on Sept. 20, 1966, and was looking good until shortly before the landing craft was to descend to the moon.

In the midst of a mid-course correction, one of three liquid-fuel thrusters failed to ignite and the spacecraft began to spin. As many as 39 attempts to fire the thruster failed and the out-of-control Surveyor 2 probe crashed with devastating force onto the face of the moon.

Prior to the descent of doom, the lander had separated from the upper stage of the Centaur rocket booster that had powered it. Once it was set loose, the spent rocket would have floated off into space and settled into an orbit.

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IT IS THAT ROCKET, nearly 30 feet long and about 10 feet in diameter, that some scientists believe to be the approaching space object that was detected Sept. 17 by astronomers on Maui using a 71-inch telescope. They dubbed the oddly slow-moving asteroid 2020 SO.

Dr. Paul Chodas, director of JPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, told CNN, “I suspect this newly discovered object 2020 SO to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun that is extremely similar to Earth's, nearly circular, in the same plane, and only slightly farther away (from) the Sun at its farthest point.”

“I'm pretty jazzed about this,” Chodas said to the Associated Press. “It’s been a hobby of mine to find one of these and draw such a link, and I’ve been doing it for decades now.”

Whatever the object is, it’s not expected to move any closer than about 27,000 miles to Earth as it is soon captured by the planet’s gravity. While it functions temporarily as a mini-moon, scientists will have a shot at confirming whether it’s an old rocket or something else.

Regardless, it will break away next spring and return to its own, far wider orbit.

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MY DAD the spacecraft cleaner was almost 92, and still enthralled by life and the cosmos, when he died in 2008. I’m channeling the delight I suspect he’d feel to know that an asteroid heading this way could be a piece of Surveyor 2, which he’d stood beside and watched lift off and ached for as communications with it went dead shortly before it was supposed to touch down on the moon.

The Surveyor project was huge to him, and hugely exciting. All his life, he’d now and then turn his gaze to the moon and say, “My fingerprints are up there.”

He didn’t mean that literally, of course. Any fingerprints on a Surveyor spacecraft would have been eliminated by Dr. Clean as surely as the errant threads on a kiddie U.S. flag.

You can contact Chris Smith at 707 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.