Luna 2076 – Page 7 – The Geopolitics of Lunar Colonization

Thorium, KREEP and Lunar Volcanism

June 22, 2020

Near side/far side distribution of thorium on the lunar surface. Image credit: Phs.org.

It has been an enduring mystery why the side of the Moon facing the Earth is marked by large dark patches, called maria (or seas, as they once were thought to be) but the far side has very little. Thirty-one percent of the near side consists of maria, but the dark side has only one percent. The maria, which are vast plains of basalt, most likely were formed by volcanic activity early in the Moon’s history.

But why the disparity between the near side and the far side? Scientists think that a clue resides in the distinctive characteristics of the rock. Based on samples that Apollo astronauts brought home from the maria, scientists found that the rock had a unique signature, which they named KREEP — for the presence of potassium (chemical symbol K), rare-earth elements (which include cerium, dysprosium, erbium, europium and others), and phosphorous (chemical symbol P) — as well as uranium and thorium.

By melting KREEP rock in high-temperature experiments, scientists from Tokyo’s Earth‐Life Science Institute (ELSI), the University of Florida, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Towson University, NASA Johnson Space Center and the University of New Mexico think that radioactive decay of some of these elements released heat that could have influenced the timing and volume of volcanic activity.

According to Phys.Org, potassium, thorium and uranium are radioactively unstable elements. appearing in a wide variety of isotopes. When the atoms break down, they yield other elements and produce heat. The heat from this radioactive decay can melt the rocks they are contained in.

Says EKSI’s Matthieu Laneuville: “Because of the relative lack of erosion processes, the moon’s surface records geological events from the solar system’s early history. In particular, regions on the moon’s near side have concentrations of radioactive elements like U and Th unlike anywhere else on the moon. Understanding the origin of these local U and Th enrichments can help explain the early stages of the moon’s formation and, as a consequence, conditions on the early Earth.”

Space Perspective Announces Space Tourism Venture

June 18, 2020

Space Perspective has announced plans to fly passengers and research payloads to the edge of space with its Spaceship Neptune. Flown by a pilot, Neptune will take up to eight passengers on a six-hour journey to 100,000 feet, above 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere, and back.

“We’re committed to fundamentally changing the way people have access to space – both to perform much-needed research to benefit life on Earth and to affect how we view and connect with our planet,” said Space Perspective Founder and Co-CEO Jane Poynter in a press release. “Today, it is more crucial than ever to see Earth as a planet, a spaceship for all humanity and our global biosphere.”

Aside from pitching itself as a rarefied tourist experience, Space Perspective is marketing itself to researchers, educators, and students from academic institutions. The first test flight is scheduled for 2021.

The company has signed a lease with Space Florida, the state’s spaceport development authority.

The principals behind the company, Jane and Taber designed the air, food and water systems for Biosphere 2, the most advanced prototype space base ever built.

Using LEDs as Gas Detectors in Confined Habitats

June 12, 2020

Tunable diode laser used for natural gas analysis. Photo credit: Metler Toledo

Whether living in lunar habitats or space ships, human explorers and colonists face a common challenge: maintaining air quality in a confined space. On Earth gases emanating from respiration (carbon dioxide), combustion, or even everyday tasks such as cooking and brewing coffee are allowed to disperse into the atmosphere where they will be diluted. But habitats in space must maintain an early warning detection system to alert occupants before gases build to dangerous levels.

Existing residential and commercial fire detectors are useless, say the authors of a paper in New Space, “Multispecies Single Light-Emitting Diode Mid-Infrared Gas Sensor for Space Habitats and Vehicles.”

Spacecraft cabins gas sensors in operation on the Skylab and International Space Station use laser-based absorption spectroscopy. However, they are expensive, they’re sensitive, and they consumer a lot of power. The authors recommend the use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which feature lower power requirements and can be implemented in a broad range of sensors.

Astrobotic to Deliver VIPER to Lunar Surface

June 11, 2020

Griffin carrying VIPER during lunar transit. Image credit: Astrobotics

NASA has selected Astrobotic to deliver a water-hunting robot to the Moon’s surface in late 2023, the company has announced. The 13-year-old Pittsburgh company was awarded a $200 million fixed-price contract to build and test a lander spacecraft that can transport NASA’s 1,000-pound robotic rover, VIPER, to the Moon.

The Griffin lunar lander is Astrobotic’s medium capacity lander product line, and is capable of delivering up to 500 kg of mass to the lunar surface.

Said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton: “Astrobotic’s lunar logistics services were created to open a new era on the Moon. Delivering VIPER to look for water and setting the stage for the first human crew since Apollo embodies our mission as a company.”

Only three countries — the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and China — have developed vehicles capable of a soft landing on the Moon. NASA hasn’t sent such a mission with either humans or robots since the Apollo program. The plan is for VIPER to spend 100 days on the Moon searching for water ice.

Moon the Ideal Spot for a Particle Collider

June 8, 2020

Particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland

High-energy physicists spend billions of dollars building sub-atomic particle colliders on Earth. Among other reasons the facilities are expensive is that they require vacuum conditions and frigid temperatures. As lunar colonization approaches, Nikolai Zaitsev at Cornell University has published a memo suggesting that the Moon might be the most promising location to build a new collider. The Moon may be remote and difficult to reach, but it has several advantages.

First, it’s very cold. Because the Moon has virtually no atmosphere, locations shaded from direct sunlight dip to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit — in the range of typical cryogenic setups on Earth, summarizes Live Science. Cold temperatures are needed to ensure that the superconducting magnets that accelerate particles to near the speed of light don’t melt down.

Second, atmospheric vacuum comes for free. The Moon has a vacuum 10 times better than anything physicists have manufactured in their experiments, which reduces the number of stray molecules interfering with experiments.

Thirdly, summarizes Live Science, the Moon could serve as a platform for shooting high-energy neutrinos to the Earth and studying how they change “flavors” as they fly. The distance between the Moon and Earth gives them a greater distance to change form but is close enough that it would be possible to capture them in sufficient quantities to study. Similarly, a lunar facility could point particles to Earth for the study of cosmic ray research.

How to Extract Ice on the Moon

May 18, 2020

Lunar ice water extractor. Concept art credit: George Sowers and MIT Technology Review

Water is essential to space exploration and colonization. Now that it has been demonstrated that billions of gallons of ice and molecular water are found on the Moon, the challenge is to figure out how to extract it.

In MIT Technology Review, space reporter Neel V. Patel lists the obstacles. Super-cold temperatures and radiation could endanger humans and degrade equipment. Lunar dust sticks to everything, wrecking machinery and posing safety issues to workers in spacesuits. And, of course, astronaut miners would have to be housed and supported on the Moon.

Lunar water comes in the form of tiny icy grained mixed with the soil, mostly in permanently shaded regions of craters in temperatures of 40 K (-233.15 °C). To be useful as a rocket fuel the material, only 5.6% water by weight, would require aggressive processing to rid contaminants.

One proposed method would be to build large towers with concave mirrors on the top that could reflect sunlight into the shadowed regions of lunar craters trapping the water. The energy would heat the lunar soil enough to get the ice to sublimate into vapor. A tent (transparent so the light could get through) would capture the vapor, which could be moved into units where it would freeze back into ice, and then purified at a separate location. Ultimately, the water would be separated into oxygen and hydrogen by electrolysis, and then liquified to the constituents used as rocket propellant.

Although humans have demonstrated the ability to operate rovers and landers that can withstand conditions on the Moon, no one knows if industrial infrastructure would hold up. Writes Patel: “It’s not easy to just wake a piece of technology from a 40 K slumber.” more “How to Extract Ice on the Moon”

Baddeleyite from Moon Rock Yields Clues to Early Moon

May 11, 2020

An earth sample of baddeleyite. Photo credit: crystalclassics.co.uk.

The formation of ancient rocks on the Moon may be directly linked to large-scale meteorite impacts, concludes a group of international scientists led by the Royal Ontario Museum after research a unique rock collected by NASA astronauts during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission to the Moon. The rock contains mineralogical evidence that it formed at incredibly high temperatures, in excess of 2300 °C/ 4300 °F, that could have been achieved by the melting of the outer layer of a planet in a large-impact event, reports Science Daily.

Researchers discovered in the rock the presence of a mineral known as baddeleyite, a stable phase arising from cubic zirconia, commonly used on earth as a substitute for diamonds in jewelry, which could have been formed only in rocks heated to above 2300 °C. While examining the structure of the crystal, the researchers measured the age of the grain, which reveals the baddeleyite formed over 4.3 billion years ago. Given that the high-temperature cubic zirconia phase must have formed before this then, they concluded that large impacts were critically important to forming new rocks on the early Moon.

“Rocks on Earth are constantly being recycled, but the Moon doesn’t exhibit plate tectonics or volcanism, allowing older rocks to be preserved,” explains Dr. Lee White, Hatch Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum. “By studying the Moon, we can better understand the earliest history of our planet. If large, super-heated impacts were creating rocks on the Moon, the same process was probably happening here on Earth.”

Adds Dr. James Darling, a reader at the University of Portsmouth and co-author of the study. “These unimaginably violent meteorite impacts helped to build the lunar crust, not only destroy it.”

Stress Testing Lunar Habitats on Earth

May 10, 2020

Shirley Dyke, head of Purdue’s RETH Institute

Purdue University’s “RETH (Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats) Institute is working with NASA to put lunar habitat concepts through testing on earth to see how well they would survive hazards such as getting radiation-bombed, blasted by meteoroids or shaken by a moonquake, reports SyFyWire. Some of the tests happen completely onscreen. Other tests incorporate realistic quarter-scale habitats.

These trials can do things that would be physically impossible on the Moon, says Shirley Dyke, head of the program. You can change the circumstances in a cyber physical test faster than you ever would be able to in real life. If you’re testing out a habitat in a lunar lava tube, you can change the location to the Moon’s surface without physically rebuilding the entire thing.

Dyke is looking for habitat characteristics such as resilience, intelligence and autonomy. She says that smart habitats need to maintain and repair themselves — and when to send for emergency-response robots. “Eventually,” she said, “we want to develop smart habitats that can respond to changes, damage and anything that could go wrong during a mission and still maintain the integrity and safety of the science inside.”

Carbon More Abundant on Moon than Thought

May 7, 2020

Kaguya Satellite. Image credit: Aero-News.net

Confounding the long-held view that the Moon is depleted of carbon and other volatile elements, a Japanese satellite has detected a steady stream of carbon ions emanating from the lunar surface. Scientists believe the carbon has been there since the Moon’s formation roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

The finding comes from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kaguya spacecraft, which spent a year-and-a-half in orbit around the Moon a decade ago. One of its instruments was a mass spectrometer, which mapped lunar ions including carbon. Recent analysis of the data, according to Science Alert, identified the carbon traces.

The concentration of carbon ions could not be explained by the deposition of carbon by solar wind, nor by the delivery of carbon on micrometeorites. Concentrations varied: Younger volcanic basalt plains on the lunar near side emitted more carbon ions than the older highlands, which suggests that the carbon is embedded in volcanic lunar glasses.

That’s a problem for the widely held theory that the Moon was formed by a large body colliding with Earth. The so-called Theia collision would have generated temperatures in the range of 4,000 to 6,000 Kelvin, which would have boiled away the volatiles and produced a volatile-depleted “dry Moon.” Instead, the Kaguya measurements suggest that the Moon could be a volatile-rich “wet” Moon.

The implications for lunar colonization are significant as well. Carbon is an essential element in biological processes. Abundant carbon would support the presence of plants and crops without the necessity of transporting it from Earth.

U.S. Backs Artemis Accords to Bypass U.N. Space Treaty

May 7, 2020

Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface. Is there such a concept in international space law as “firsties”?

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty states that celestial bodies and the Moon are not subject to “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use of occupation, or by any other means.” Critics contend that the restriction will put a serious damper on lunar mining and colonization. Now the Trump administration is backing a new international agreement called the Artemis Accords to cerate standards of behavior for moon mining practices, reports Just the News.

In 2015, the U.S. passed a law granting private companies ownership over any resources they mine in outer space. Similar laws do not exist anywhere else in the world. The Artemis Accords with other potentially spacefaring nations would bypass the United Nations treaty process, which would require getting buy-in from non-spacefaring nations.

Says Just the News: “The key conceit of the accords will be establishing ‘safety zones’ surrounding future moon bases, preventing damage and conflict between different countries with outlets on the moon.”