This NASA image shows distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s north south and north poles.
Looking for creative approaches to tap lunar resources to meet the needs of astronauts on the Moon, NASA has reached out to small businesses and nonprofit research institutes for ideas. Working through its small business programs, the agency has winnowed down 409 proposals for Phase 1 development.
Consistent with NASA’s goals for Project Artemis, the proposals are focused on extraction and processing of water ice from lunar regolith to create oxygen, drinking water and rocket fuel, according to Universe Today.
An artist’s concept of Canadarm3, Canada’s smart robotic system in orbit around the Moon. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)
John B. Sheldon has coined the term “lunapolitics” to describe the extension of geopolitics, or the competition between national powers, into cislunar space. The U.S., China and other powers aspire to establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon to exploit lunar resources for economic benefit. Lunapolitics, he writes, will keep diplomats, executives, and strategists busy for decades to come.
In a SpaceNews.com op-ed, Sheldon offers 10 principles to to consider as Earth leaders create the political and economic framework for mankind’s future on the Moon.
Political and economic competition for the Moon is a positive. But competition needs rules of the road undergirded by widely accepted space law. “The alternative risks a zero-sum, overtly militarized scramble for the Moon that benefits no one over the long term. lunapolitics is essentially the management of this competition.”
Currently, the United States is the prime mover of lunapolitics. America is the only space power today capable of mustering the technology, financial resources and diplomatic will to establish the foundation for a lunapolitical framework. But it will be isolated if it disregards the interests of China, Russia, Europe, and other space-faring powers.
Lunapolitical power is predicated on geopolitical power. The conditions favoring countries to become space powers include space launch facilities that provide routine access to cislunar space, an educated workforce, a vibrant and developed business climate, and an advanced industrial/technological base. The United States and China likely will be the leading lunapolitical powers.
Lunapolitics have an economic dimension. A lunaeconomic agenda will require a deep understanding of the evolving political economy and business dynamics on the Moon. Narrow business interests should not dictate the strategic interests of lunar powers.
Freedom of passage is a core principle for a lunar economy. A lunapolitical architecture should ensure freedom of passage and navigation between the Earth and the Moon for any country or company capable of doing so.
Protect the lunar environment. Humanity’s poor environmental legacy on Earth should not be replicated on the Moon, the Solar System, or beyond.
Lunapolitical alliances will constantly evolve. Lunapolitical alliances will be transient, shifting with political and economic interests. A durable lunapolitical architecture should be able to withstand shifting interests and alliances.
Avoid excessive militarization of space. A lunapolitical architecture should advance a predominantly civil and economic agenda. Overt militarization by any country will undermine legitimacy and provoke adverse international reaction. The proper role of the military should be to ensure freedom of passage and navigation, search and rescue, and enforcing internationally accepted standards of conduct.
Lunapolitics is normal; lunapolitik is not. Unbounded, rapacious, zero-sum and overtly militarized “lunapolitik” is antithetical to other goals.
Lunapoalitics is a long game, not an election-cycle issue. Lunapolitics requires long-term, strategic thinking based on prudence and enlightened self-interest.
“The future is shapeable,” concludes Sheldon, “and it is our collective choice whether lunapolitics opens up new economic opportunities and scientific possibilities, or whether our future in space ends before it could even begin.”
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”
Nothing to see here, move along now! Image captured by China’s Yutu 2 moon rover.
A team with China’s Chang’e 4 mission to the far side of the Moon has discovered a curious substance, which it describes (translated) as “gel-like.” They describe the material as dark greenish and glistening impact melt breccia, measuring 20 inches by six inches — signs of possible presence of glasses resulting from meteor impact melts or volcanic eruptions.
According to a report by Our Space, a Chinese-language science-outreach publication (and reported on by Space.com), the breccia — broken fragments of minerals cemented together — was formed by impact-generated welding, cementing and agglutinating of lunar regolith and breccia.
The paper also looks at the surrounding area, writes Space.com. The authors suggest that the lunar regolith consists of a mixture from multiple sources, including ejecta from the impact that created the nearby Finsen crater and possible contributions from Alder crater. more “China Probe Discovers New Moon Substance”
This image from a simulation by Q.Q. Shi, Shandong University, shows how the Earth’s magnetosphere has a long tail under the pressure of solar wind just before a radiative shock wave (the orange mass at right) approaches at 1.7 million miles per hour.
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 SciTechDailysays 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.
Using the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, mission members have found evidence that the Moon’s subsurface may be richer in minerals like iron and titanium than previously thought.
The Moon is widely believed to have originated from the collision of a Mars-sized proto-plant with the young Earth. In theory, the Moon’s bulk chemical composition should resemble that of the Earth. But many parts of the surface, such as the lunar highlands, appear to be metal-poor.
The mini-RF, explains NASA, allowed scientists to measure an electrical property known as the dielectric constant within lunar soil piled on crater floors in the Moon’s northern hemisphere.
The research team noticed that the property increased with crater size — up to a certain point. When the craters reached three to twelve miles in diameter, the property remained constant. No one expected to find the relationship. Says the NASA article:
Discovery of this pattern opened a door to a new possibility. Because meteors that form larger craters also dig deeper into the Moon’s subsurface, the team reasoned that the increasing dielectric constant of the dust in larger craters could be the result of meteors excavating iron and titanium oxides that lie below the surface. Dielectric properties are directly linked to the concentration of these metal minerals.
If their hypothesis were true, it would mean only the first few hundred meters of the Moon’s surface is scant in iron and titanium oxides, but below the surface, there’s a steady increase to a rich and unexpected bonanza. …
The larger craters, with their increased dielectric material, were also richer in metals, suggesting that more iron and titanium oxides had been excavated from the depths of 0.3 to 1 mile (0.5 to 2 kilometers) than from the upper 0.1 to 0.3 miles (0.2 to 0.5 kilometers) of the lunar subsurface.
In this simulation of the Moon’s interior, the yellow represents the global magma ocean. A crust (grey) has formed over top. Convection zones can be seen within the mantle, and a solid core (white) sits at the middle. IMage credit: DLR / M. Maurice
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.
Radiation will be a major hazard of living on the Moon, especially for anyone not behind protective shielding. The release of energy from solar flares has been difficult to forecast. Now four Japanese scientists with Nagoya University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have developed a model, based on observations of the sun from 2008 to 2018, for predicting large solar flares. In an article published in Science, they say that “in most cases” the model correctly identifies the region of the sun that will produce large flares within 20 hours and, within limits, how powerful it will be.
However, say the authors, the model does produce some false positives and false negatives. “Accurate predictions of solar flares could improve forecasts of space weather conditions around Earth,” they say. Presumably, those predictions apply to the Moon as well. Here is the abstract for the paper in Science.
Solar flares are highly energetic events in the Sun’s corona that affect Earth’s space weather. The mechanism that drives the onset of solar flares is unknown, hampering efforts to forecast them, which mostly rely on empirical methods. We present the κ-scheme, a physics-based model to predict large solar flares through a critical condition of magnetohydrodynamic instability, triggered by magnetic reconnection. Analysis of the largest (X-class) flares from 2008 to 2019 (during solar cycle 24) shows that the κ-scheme predicts most imminent large solar flares, with a small number of exceptions for confined flares. We conclude that magnetic twist flux density, close to a magnetic polarity inversion line on the solar surface, determines when and where solar flares may occur and how large they can be.
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”
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.
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.
Using the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, mission members have found evidence that the Moon’s subsurface may be richer in minerals like iron and titanium than previously thought.
