Geoff Brooks, a chemical engineer with Australia’s Swinburne University, has been giving considerable thought to the challenges of building structures under the extreme conditions of the Moon. Temperatures swing from -180° C to 120° as the Moon alternates between intense light and deep darkness. The surface is bombarded by solar and cosmic rays. Glass-like dust particles get everywhere. Even the chemical behavior of materials changes.

“If you think about the way bricks are made, a bit like pottery, imagine trying to make pottery on the moon, where the perfect vacuum changes the way materials heat up and the shape that they take,” Brooks tells Create, an Australian engineering publication. “These are the kinds of experiments we’re now building, to test not only how the materials will react on the moon but how we can work with those conditions to create a structure.”

Humans will need structures to shelter them from cosmic rays and moon dust. “We will need buildings with thick walls to protect space travelers,” he says. “However, on the moon we have only the rocks on the ground and the sun to work with. Everything else is difficult and expensive to get there.”

Other research priorities include finding ways to manage abrasive dust, and recycling space junk. 

Brooks heads a team of approximately 15 academics and PhD students encompassing disciplines such as mechanical engineering, mechatronics, product design, and physics.

Lava tubes are formed by lava flowing through a volcanic vent beneath a hardened surface. If the lava empties, it leaves behind a cave, typically in a long worm-like shape. These tubes have been spotted on Earth, on Mars and on the Moon. On Earth these structures range in diameter between 10 to 100 meters in diameter. Because there appears to be a strong correlation between gravity and tube-depth, Martian tubes are estimated to be 100 times wider, and lunar tubes 1,000 times wider.

In a new study, “Lava tubes on Earth, Moon and Mars: A review of their size and morphology revealed by comparative planetology,” a team of researchers from Italian universities has assembled a database of tubes and potential tubes. Typically, they leave long, sinuous channels that can be spotted on the surface. Sometimes, they leave cave openings.

“We measured the size and gathered the morphology of lunar and Martian collapse chains (collapsed lava tubes), using digital terrain models, which we obtained through satellite stereoscopic images and laser altimetry taken by interplanetary probes,” said Riccardo Pozzobon, as reported by Universe Today. “We then compared these data to topographic studies about similar collapse chains on the Earth’s surface and to laser scans of the inside of lava tubes in Lanzarote and the Galapagos. These data allowed us to establish a … relationship between collapse chains and subsurface cavities that are still intact.”

Many scientists have suggested that lava tubes on the Moon may make favorable spots for human habitation because they would be protected from cosmic and solar radiation and they would experience less temperature variability between long lunar days and nights. A major concern, however, is how stable the structures are. Many orbital photographs show collapsed tubes. The Italians believe they are most likely stable, thanks to low gravity on the Moon. Collapses are likely due to meteor impacts.

NASA is working on plans for robotic exploration of the tubes. The proposed “Moon Diver” mission would use a rover tethered to a lander to explore the tubes. Thelander would land near a skylight, then a tethered rover would climb its way down to the tube floor.

Nearly 90 of this year’s roughly 1,000 Air Force Academy graduates will become commissioned officers in the newly created Space Force. Some are  members of an academy group, the Institute for Applied Space Policy and Strategy (IASPS), which features weekly speakers and formal research projects. The group, according to Science, is dedicated to gaming out the policies and philosophies that could guide military space activity.

One big question cadets ask is if the Space Force might someday have a military presence on the Moon. Such a thought might conflict with the pacifist worldview of many scientists, who regard cislunar space as a place for commerce and scientific inquiry, but in a world driven by geopolitical competition, someone needs to be thinking about it. In an interview with Science, IASPS President J.P. Byrne, who will graduate in 2021, offered a number of insights in the realm of “astropolitics.”

How can the United States, he asks, best mitigate the problem of space debris through space situational awareness and space traffic management.

Will mining be realistic, and if so when?

Will deterrence in space reflect deterrence on Earth? If something happens to a satellite in space, does that warrant a space response or an Earth response?

Will it be necessary, or even possible, for the military to sustain a presence on the Moon?

“The group was really interested in finding out what future role Space Force might have on the military-on-the-Moon concept 20 years or so down the line,” says Byrne. “Intergovernmental agency cooperation is paramount to having some future lunar base. Maybe [in this scenario], Space Force would select astronaut candidates who would complete training through NASA.”

NASA has published new directives to protect the Moon and Mars from contamination by Earth germs carried by human voyagers. The purpose is to protect the planetary bodies from biological contamination from Earth — and to protect Earth from organisms originating on Mars.

“We’re trying to balance the interests of the science community, the interest of the human exploration community and the interest of the commercial community,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced during a “Moon Dialogs” webinar. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection, housed within the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, is tasked with ensuring will that the directives are complied with.

Bridenstine said it is important the future missions leave behind a “pristine environment” so humans know that what they discover in the future was not left there by other humans, as reported by Space.com. “We have to make sure that we are inventorying every kind of biological substance and even nonbiological substance — organics for example — that could leave something behind on the moon that could be problematic for future research.” more “Protecting the Moon from Earth Germs”

The Earth’s magnetosphere protects the plant from bursts of solar wind — high-speed particles emanating from the sun — and the Moon as well, at least during the 25% of the time when the Earth stands between it and the sun. However, NASA scientists have discovered that solar wind can cause the tail of Earth’s protective magnetic bubble to flap like a windsock in a high breeze, pulling the tail so far out of line that the Moon loses its shelter.

The finding is significant because solar radiation may be the greatest hazard facing explorers and settlers on the Moon, and their equipment, making the ability to predict bursts of radiation a critical necessity.

Summarizing new research in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight writes in SciTechDaily says that the findings came from compiling data measured by spacecraft at multiple locations in cislunar space and on the Moon. States the article: more “Solar Shock Waves Can Affect Shape of Earth’s Magnetosphere”

Harkening back to the success of cubesats, small, standardized satellites, NASA will launch a small rover. Iris, that it hopes will also be inexpensive to produce.

NASA, Astrobotic, and Carnegie Mellon University are teaming up in the CubeRover project, which targets a 2021 launch date in a private delivery run paralleling the agency’s Artemis program to return to the Moon by 2024.

Iris is about the size of a shoebox, reports Space.com, and weighs less than 5 lbs. (2.3 kilograms). It travels on four wheels.

If all goes well, the rover will drive about 160 feet (49 meters), approximately the width of a football field, a journey that should tell engineers more about how best to travel over the moon’s dusty surface. The drive will take the rover far enough away from its landing site to study how the landing itself alters the surface of the moon.

Iris will support other science and technology payloads on the surface with power, portability and communications.

According to the latest estimates by a team of researchers with the Technische Universität Berlin, it might have taken ten times longer than previously thought for the early Moon to transform from a ball of super-heated magma into its current form.

The oldest rock found on the Moon, brought to Earth by the Apollo 14 mission, has been dated to 4.51 billion years old, comparing to the estimated 4.54 billion years estimated for the age of the Earth. But minerals can go back only as far as the moment when those minerals formed. To date the Moon, scientists need to know how much time elapsed until the magma ocean solidified, explains Sky & Telescope.

Maxime Maurice and his colleagues at the German university have developed a new thermal evolution model — a detailed computer simulation — to reconstruct the first 200 million years of lunar evolution. Their studies identified two previously underappreciated dynamics: the insulating effect of the primordial lunar crust, and mantle convection that probably started even before the magma ocean completely solidified.

It has been long known that the early Moon formed a crust made of a light mineral called pagioclase, which floated atop the magma ocean. That crust turned out to be an excellent insulator. While previous studies had accounted for that effect, Maxime concluded the insulating effect had been under-estimated.

The other factor was mantle convection. Summarizes Sky & Telescope:

The lunar magma ocean solidified from the bottom up because high pressure at depth forced the magma to solidify even at high temperatures. This process likely solidified 80% of the magma ocean within 1,000 years of the Moon’s formation. If mantle convection started at this point, it could have allowed heat to continue flowing from the depths toward the surface, keeping the magma ocean hot and molten.

On Earth, mantle convection creates the magma that feeds volcanoes. “In this case, it would be exactly the same, but the volcanoes would have spilled their lava into the magma ocean,” Maurice explains.

Until now, van Westrenen says, most lunar evolution scenarios assumed that mantle rocks didn’t start moving until the magma ocean had completely solidified.

According to van Westrenen, the combination of these two processes makes a huge difference for the longer-term survival of the magma ocean.

A slowly crystallizing magma ocean could require a reinterpretation of mineral isotope dating of many lunar samples, and thus for the aging of the Moon-forming impact. The bottom line, the Moon may be 100 million years younger than commonly postulated.

NASA is offering $35,000 in prizes for anyone who can design a toilet that can be used on the Moon. The specs are demanding, reports CNN Business.

The toilet must be functional in the microgravity of space and the 1/6G of the Moon.

It must accommodate men and women.

It should should conserve water, a scarce and valuable resource, and “help maintain a pristine environment inside the lander that is free of odors and other contaminants,”

The toilet should be easy to clean and maintain.

Serving a crew of two astronauts for 14 days, the toilet should allow for a turnaround time of five minutes or less between uses. more “A Space Loo for Astronaut Poo”