 Moore was also known for his 1959 expedition to the stratosphere with Malcolm Ross, in which they performed the first spectrographic analysis of the planet Venus which was free of interference from the Earth's atmosphere, thereby proving the existence of water on that planet; this expedition involved an ascent to 89,000 feet (then a record for altitude).In 1969, Moore became the chairman of Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research and greatly expanded the lab's facilities.Moore was a professor of atmospheric physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro for several years, and nominally retired in 1985; however, he continued his research afterward, and his subsequent discoveries led to the first improvement in the design of the lightning rod since that device's invention by Benjamin Franklin.