Luna 2076 – Page 8 – The Geopolitics of Lunar Colonization

Protecting the Moon’s Archaeological Heritage

April 7, 2020

Early footprints on the Moon — an archaeological treasure to be preserved?

It’s not too early to start thinking about the archaeology of the Moon, contends space archaeologist Alice Gorman in an interview in The New Lean.

The Apollo 12 mission in 1969 marked the first encounter with an archaeological artifact on the Moon. Astronauts landed 180 meters away from Surveyor 3, a robotic landing craft sent to the Moon in 1967. they removed a camera and other bits and pieces to take back to Earth, When NASA analyzed the materials, they found that the Surveyor 3 and Apollo 12 landings stirred up enough lunar dust to abrade the surfaces.

Future missions are planning to visit the Apollo sites and remove samples for analysis to gauge the impact on the lunar environment on human materials. What concerns Gorman is the prospect of erasing all those original footprints and causing further damage by stirring up more dust.

There is an archaeological principle that you never excavate all of a site. You always leave an unexcavated deposit, or you leave rock art on the walls. You leave material for future scientists to sample because we don’t know what techniques will be available in the future. more “Protecting the Moon’s Archaeological Heritage”

Recycling Pee into Lunar Building Materials

March 30, 2020

Ewwww…. experimental urea-based construction material

European researchers have found that the urea in human urine can be used as a “plasticizer” to combine with lunar regolith to make building materials.

The cost of transporting building materials to the Moon is so expensive — roughly $10,000 per pound — that scientists are looking for ways to utilize materials readily available on the Moon. Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish and Italian researchers theorized that urea could be incorporated into concrete to soften the initial mixture and make it more liable before it hardens, reports Phys.org.

“To make geopolymer concrete that will be used on the moon, the idea is to use what is already there: regolith (loose material from the moon’s surface) and the water from the ice present in some areas,” explains one of the authors, Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Murcia). “But moreover, with this study, we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used. The two main components of urine are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures.”

Using material similar to regolith mixed with urea, researchers have manufactured concrete cylinders using a 3-D printer. The urea mixture supported heavy weights and remained almost stable in shape. Resistance was tested at a temperature of 80°C, and was found to increase even after eight freeze-thaw cycles like those on the Moon.

Next step: figuring out how to extract the urea from the urine.

Fungi as Building Material for Lunar Habitats

March 7, 2020

The humble fungus has remarkable properties that researchers at NASA’s Ames Research facility think could make it a useful material for building human habitats on the Moon and Mars. The mycelium — the branching, thread-like part of a fungus — has a higher bend strength than reinforced concrete and a higher compression strength than lumber. It acts as a fire retardant, and it is capable of growing and repairing itself.

“Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs – a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs,” principal investigator Lynn Rothschild tells SciTechDaily. “Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.”

Researchers envision human explorers taking along a compact habitat built of a lightweight materials supplemented with dormant fungi. Upon arrival, they would unfold the structure and add water, and the fungi would grow around the framework into a functional human habitat. Writes SciTechDaily:

Just like the astronauts, fungal mycelia is a lifeform that has to eat and breathe. That’s where something called cyanobacteria comes in – a kind of bacterium that can use energy from the Sun to convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and fungus food.

These pieces come together in an elegant habitat concept with a three-layered dome. The outer-most layer is made up of frozen water ice, perhaps tapped from the resources on the Moon or Mars. That water serves as a protection from radiation and trickles down to the second layer – the cyanobacteria. This layer can take that water and photosynthesize using the outside light that shines through the icy layer to produce oxygen for astronauts and nutrients for the final layer of mycelia.

That last layer of mycelia is what organically grows into a sturdy home, first activated to grow in a contained environment and then baked to kill the lifeforms – providing structural integrity and ensuring no life contaminates Mars and any microbial life that’s already there. Even if some mycelia somehow escaped, they will be genetically altered to be incapable of surviving outside the habitat.

The Ames team also imagines mycelia being used for water filtration and biomining systems that extract minerals from wastewater.

Mapping the Moon’s South Pole

March 6, 2020

Scientists at NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) have created the Lunar South Pole Atlas, a detail chart of the Moon’s underbelly, in preparation for the upcoming Artemis mission. The south pole is the subject of intense interest because there is reason to believe that it contains the Moon’s largest reserves of H2O, which, because they are captured in craters that are never exposed to the sun, never melt.

Photography indicates the presence of two towering massifs (or mountains) — Malapert Massif and Leinbiz Beta — comparable to Earth’s Mount Everest. Writes Popular Mechanics:

The difference in elevation between the tip of Malapert Massif and the base of Hawthorne crater is about 5 miles. For context, that’s almost as tall as Mount Everest, which stretches nearly 5.5 miles into the sky. In the case of Leibniz Beta, which lies next to Shoemaker crater, the elevation difference is a whopping 6.2 miles—far higher than Earth’s tallest mountain.

The craters are home to some of the coldest temperatures ever recorded in the solar system.

It Takes a Tough Tire to Drive on the Moon

February 19, 2020

Vehicle maintenance on the lunar surface will be a significant challenge for explorers and colonists. Lunar regolith, a mix of dust, rock and debris, is superfine, ultra-abrasive, and can lodge itself in the tiniest crevasses. Not only that, but it carries an electrostatic charge. Bridgestone, the Japanese tire company, is looking ahead… far ahead… at the market opportunities. The company is working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to develop a specialized rover, reports Popular Mechanics.

JAXA’s rover will shuttle up to four astronauts and could log as many as 6,000 miles on the lunar surface, compared to 22 miles reached by the Apollo-era rovers.

The Apollo rovers were coated in a mesh of zinc-coated piano wire and wrapped in titanium treads. Bridgestone has revealed a wheel design consisting of two lobes of braided steel woven together — inspired by the toes of a camel.

“It’s biomimicry,” Bridgestone America’s chief technology officer, Nizar Trigui, told Popular Science. “The pattern helps the tire carry the load without penetrating too deeply into the sand.”

The new tire design is being tested under simulated lunar conditions with crushed lava rock and broken glass.

Robots to Fabricate Solar Panels on the Moon

January 29, 2020

Foreseeable needs for space exploration exceed projected payroll-launch capacity, so NASA envisions the need for robotic manufacturing on the Moon. A newly funded project called The Assemblers envisions a swarm of robots fabricating solar arrays and undertaking other assembly tasks on the surface of the Moon or Mars.

A new video published on Space.com shows how the assembly would look from a robot’s point of view as it examines a structure and targets certain areas for more work. On Earth, they are functioning under the watchful eye of engineers, but in time they will work autonomously.

“The project goal is to increase the technology readiness level for the modular robot, autonomous in-space assembly, and develop a robotic prototype for ground testing,” principal investigator James Neilan, a computer engineer at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, said in a statement.

The deliverable for the $2.5 million project will be a prototype that can manipulate items and assemble components in a space environment. The assemblers will use task-management software to keep tabs on errors and address issues as they arise. Writes Space.com:

The Assembler robots are a series of stacked platforms with actuators in between the platforms, as well as sensors that help each robot figure out where its components are located. “The team is working on algorithms for software so that the robots could choose how many platforms to stack and the right tool for the task at hand,” NASA officials said in the statement.

European Lab Develops Method to Extract Oxygen from Regolith

January 19, 2020

Simulated regolith before (left) and after oxygen extraction.

A team of European Space Agency (ESA) scientists think it has found a way to produce oxygen from lunar regolith, and it has opened a “prototype oxygen plant” inside a Dutch lab to refine the process.

“Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both for breathing and in the local production of rocket fuel,” said Beth Lomax of the University of Glasgow in a statement.

Samples of moon dust returned from the lunar surface confirm that the material is made up of 40-45% oxygen by weight. The oxygen is bound up chemically in the form of minerals and glass oxides.

The European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), based in Noordwijk, Netherlands, uses a method called “molten salt electrolysis,” in which a simulated regolith is heated to 940 degrees Centigrade in a metal basket and molten calcium chloride salt acts as an electrolyte. Passing a current through the material extracts the oxygen and causes it to migrate to an anode where it can be collected.

As a byproduct, the process creates useful metal alloys. “The production process leaves behind a tangle of different metals,” says Alexandre Meurisse, ESA research fellow, “and this is another useful line of research, to see what are the most useful alloys that could be produced from them, and what kind of applications could they be put to.”

The precise combination of metals will vary depending on where on the Moon the regolith is coming from. There would be significant regional differences.

Says Tommaso Ghidini, head of ESA’s Structures, Mechanisms and Materials Division: “We’re shifting our engineering approach to a systematic use of lunar resources in-situ. We are working with our colleagues in the Human and Robotics Exploration Directorate, European industry and academia to provide top class scientific approaches and key enabling technologies like this one, towards a sustained human presence on the Moon and maybe one day Mars.” more “European Lab Develops Method to Extract Oxygen from Regolith”

The Moon Once Had Stronger Magnetic Field than Earth

January 3, 2020

Once upon a time the Moon had a magnetic field, and it was likely stronger than Earth’s is today. That field, generated by a powerful dynamo in the Moon’s core, petered out about one billion years ago.

The latest theory, propagated by MIT scientists in the journal Science Advances, suggests that crystallization of the Moon’s inner iron core stirred the electrically charged fluid and produced the dynamo.

“The magnetic field is this nebulous thing that pervades space, like an invisible force field,” says Benjamin Weiss, professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. “We’ve shown that the dynamo that produced the moon’s magnetic field died somewhere between 1.5 and 1 billion years ago, and seems to have been powered in an Earth-like way.”

Most studies of lunar magnetism have been based on rock samples from the Apollo missions; most of the ancient rocks are estimated to be thee to four billion years old. When they were spewed out as lava, their microscopic grains aligned in the direction of the Moon’s magnetic field. Lunar rocks whose magnetic histories began less than three billion years ago do not show such alignment, which suggests that lunar vulcanism had largely ceased by that time.

The MIT scientists theorize that the early Moon was much closer to the Earth than it is today, and much more susceptible to its gravitational effects. In a phenomenon known as “precession,” the solid outer shell of the cooling Moon wobbled in response to the Earth’s gravity. The wobbling stirred up the fluid in the core, the way swishing a cup of coffee stirs up the liquid inside, explains MIT News.

As the moon moved slowly away from the Earth, the precession effect decreased, weakening the dynamo and the magnetic field. About 2.5 billion years ago, core crystallization became the dominant mechanism by which the lunar dynamo continued, producing a weaker magnetic field that continued to dissipate as the moon’s core eventually fully crystallized.

A Closeup Look at Offworld’s Autonomous Robots

January 2, 2020

Video credit: Voice of America

Indians Will Give Moonshot Another Try

January 1, 2020

Chandrayaan-2 module. Image credit: ESRO

Despite the demise of the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft in a crash landing on the Moon, the Indian Space research Organization will attempt another soft landing in the near future. The third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, could launch by the end of this year, although 2021 is a possibility, reports C/Net.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission will be much cheaper, about 6.15 billion rupees ($86.2 million) compared to 9.6 billion rupees for its ill-fated predecessor. The new mission, which include a rover and lander, will aim for the same spot on the south pole where vast water deposits are believed to exist.

Chandrayaan-2 was launched July 22, 2019, and consisted of three components: a lunar orbiter, a lunar lander and a rover. Though the lander and rover were lost during the crash landing, says C/Net, the orbiter still orbits the moon and is expected to continue surveying for seven years.