Results In for Constellation Poll
The results of the SpaceTalkNOW poll regarding Project Constellation are in. To the question “Should NASA’s Project Constellation to return humans to deep space be cancelled?” 84.9 percent of respondents said “no.” By a wide margin the people believe that we should return to the moon and deep space. So it would seem that on this issue, like so many others, the Administration is at odds with the folks.
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Lunar Scientists Need You
Have you ever daydreamed of exploring space? Ever found yourself wandering off on an imaginary expedition of discovery across some vast, alien landscape? Of course, the regular guy and gal could never hope to make such a journey in person. That’s really only Hollywood stuff. Right? Wrong. In fact, you now have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts and be the next human to look across the moonscape and discover some of its many secrets as part of a serious and ongoing scientific program.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched on June 18, 2009, and since it arrived in orbit around the moon has been taking the highest resolution images of its surface in existence. Data is coming in from the spacecraft at such a phenomenal rate that scientists have difficulty sifting through it all, so they’ve asked for the help of folks just like you to help them identify high-value targets for further scientific study. And for this citizen science project they’ve set up a website where you can go to take part. After viewing videos and other help that will show you how to recognize features, you’ll peruse through images of the moon’s surface few others — if any — have seen, even among planetary scientists. In the process of becoming a lunar researcher, you will learn more about the surface or our nearest neighbor in space than you ever have before and perhaps discover something as yet unknown. It’s a voyage of discovery seldom available to those outside astrophysics.
Go to MoonZoo.org and register. From there, you’ll have tools at your disposal that allow you to mark interesting features like the more recent craters that have excavated light-colored material in an ejecta blanket all around the impact site. They call these fresh white craters, and the science team will count the number that you identify so they can calculate the current impact rate. The information you provide with help them to assess the risk to earth of asteroid strikes.
Fresh white craters are the youngest of the impacts, spreading their ejecta blankets hundreds of kilometers in some cases. Image courtesy NASA.
You may also discover elongated pits. These are areas where a subsurface lava tube has collapsed in on itself. Another, similar feature called a “skylight” has been discovered recently in which only a section of a lava tube’s ceiling has collapsed to reveal a cavernous expanse within. These features have scientists and lunar base planners alike excited. Such areas could serve humans as a natural shelter from the radiation environment. They may also be sources of water, trapping it in frozen form in their permanently dark recesses. In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), more popularly known as the concept of “living off the land,” is an important strategy for maintaining a permanent human presence on the moon. If we can obtain shelter from natural features and extract from them some of the resources and consumables we need, the cost of the venture is dramatically reduced. I becomes obtainable within our lifetimes. It becomes attainable by you!
Elongated pits are areas where subsurface lava tubes have collapsed. Image courtesy NASA.
Spacefaring nations have been launching probes and landers to the surface of the moon for decades. You may also run across the technology they left behind. When you find these pieces of space mission hardware, the positions that you mark will be used to build up a database that can be made available to the worldwide science community and used as positional landmarks for lunar cartographic mapping.
Apollo 17 Landing Site. Note the dark tracks of the lunar rover extending left and right. Image courtesy NASA
These and other features — many of which could only be described as just plain weird — are yours to discover. You’ll have a great deal of fun and adventure, and you can share what you find through the built-in Moon Zoo blog. And perhaps you’ll discover something that no one else has ever seen. If you have the heart of an explorer, this site is definitely for you.
Moon Zoo belongs to a larger community of citizen science projects called the Zooniverse. There you’ll also find Galaxy Zoo Hubble where you can help astronomers figure out how galaxies form and evolve by classifying their shape using Hubble images. There’s Solar Stormwatch where you can help spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Then there’s Galaxy Zoo Mergers and Galaxy Zoo Supernovae. But if you’re interested in helping build a knowledge base of our moon, and in so doing help usher in the age of lunar settlement, Moon Zoo is your best bet.
So log on and plug in to a universe of discovery. You can make a difference, and you’ll satisfy that innate urge to explore that we all have. And maybe, just maybe, the day when you can board a rocket bound for a moon base to see the sights in person will get even closer.
The Undiscovered Country
What we know today of the moon’s fundamental nature is light years ahead of what it was only a year ago, thanks to a spacecraft named LCROSS, or Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. It’s mission was to look for evidence of water by slamming a large mass into a permanently shadowed crater at the lunar south pole then directly sample the impact plume by flying through it. A painstakingly meticulous post-impact examination of the telemetry revealed that they had indeed found what they were looking for. Over night, the cries of “bombing the moon” and “mission failure” were replaced with the infinitely more rational realization that we were witnessing one of those moments in history when knowledge takes a huge leap forward. Scientists, engineers and just plain enthusiasts of the moon immediately recognized the discovery as a “game changer,” because in one fell swoop, it meant that the cost of establishing and maintaining a human presence there, be it an outpost or a colony, was profoundly reduced.
NASA’s Project Constellation to permanently return humans to the moon would seem to have gotten a shot in the arm from the revelation that it would no longer need to transport tens of tons of water from earth at enormous cost in fuel. Water for drinking, mixing with lunar-derived concrete with which to build shelters, deriving oxygen for breathing and a myriad other necessities for the wet substance can now be extracted on site. But before the ink is even dry on the scientific papers that proclaim this most fantastic of discoveries, the political powers that be, in their most boundless wisdom, propose to scrap the entire program.
The debate over the fate of the moon program is still building, and it remains to be seen where it all leads. A defiant Congress intent on saving Constellation has dug in its heels, only last week demanding that NASA produce all documents used in reaching its decision to end the program. But whether the politicians succumb to the Not Invented Here syndrome (remember, Constellation was the Vision of another president), the fact that we now know the moon to be immanently obtainable as a destination and a new source of natural resources, wealth and prosperity remains.
So where do we go from here? As I see it, there are two courses for returning to the moon possible within the current environment.
Course 1: Constellation is saved, but is redefined and reworked. The expensive Ares rocket for transporting civil service and commercial astronauts to low earth orbit is deemed unsustainable and ended in favor of privately-developed rockets. Though it could survive from a purely technical standpoint, it is unlikely Ares could ever reach a flight rate that would make it economically viable. Leave that mission to the private sector, who despite all the hype to the contrary, are quite capable of fulfilling that role and are well on their way to proving their own designs and vehicles for both cargo and human transport.
The Orion capsule for transporting astronauts between earth, the moon and other deep space destinations and for returning them to earth, deserves further scrutiny. The private sector may be able to build and fly it – or a similar, capsule-based design – at far less expense than NASA. But either way, we need a vehicle with its capabilities, and unlike Ares, there is no vehicle currently in the private sector pipeline that can take on the mission of Orion.
Finally, the third – and to my mind most important – vehicle component to Constellation is Altair, which will take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface. This part of the program, if no other, must continue. It is the heart and soul of Constellation. We must have a vehicle capable of transporting crew and cargo to the lunar surface, even if ultimately they become two roles slated for two, different vehicles. The same development program could produce both.
Course 2: Constellation and the billions already spent on it are added to the ash heap of NASA programs started in good faith throughout its history only to be scrapped later by political forces. In this case, it falls to the private sector to completely design and fund the venture.
Investors like Elon Musk of SpaceX, Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic are pumping tens of millions into private space ventures, but the overall number of investors is still insufficient to take on a program as massive as the settlement of the moon. But history has shown us that competition serves as a powerful mechanism through which this shortfall may be addressed. Take for example airline transportation. In the early part of the 20th century, there was neither enough pilots and airplanes nor was there the operations know-how to profit from transporting passengers, so the Orteig Prize was offered to jump start an industry that was as yet only the stuff of dreams. It was that $25,000 prize that spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his now famous flight from New York to Paris in May of 1927, forever altering the course or aviation history.
Fast forward to the latter part of that century when a visionary named Peter Diamandis realized that the time had come to offer up a prize for jump starting yet another industry that existed only in the minds of a few dreamers. It was called the X Prize, and it offered $10M to the first team to fly into space twice within two weeks and do it without any government money. Again, it was a prize that offered the best hope of encouraging research and development for
By 2003 when the competition was in full swing, it was anybody’s guess which of the 26 competitors would win, but I knew it would be Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites. No, I didn’t have a crystal ball and I’m not clairvoyant. Neither were necessary for picking the winner, because even a cursory assessment of the contenders revealed one very telling fact: that Scaled was the only group building and testing hardware. The remainder fielded nothing more than impressive, computer-generated pictures of concepts but not one, tangible thing on which you could place your hands; just so much vapor ware.
So today when I look to pick the winner of the newest X Prize offering $30M to the first team to place a robot on the moon, drive it 500 meters over the lunar surface and send back pictures, I once again look for who’s building and testing hardware. After all, computer models, no matter how impressive, can’t move a single inch much less fly to the moon and drive over it’s surface.
The Astrobotics team is one of the 21 teams now registered in the competition. Led by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, they bring to bear an impressive knowledge base and practical experience gained from building robots to carry out missions too dangerous for humans on earth. There were Dante I and II deployed to the interior of volcanoes in Alaska and Antarctica as well as Pioneer, which went to the Sarcophagus at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor following the disaster in 1999. This team already has an impressive track record and a man at the helm with a practical, business approach to tackling new challenges.
Now the team is building Red Rover prototype robots designed to take on the harsh environment of the moon, which presents them with a few challenges not faced by the famous Mars rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.
Rover Currently Under Testing. Courtesy Astrobotics and Carnegie Melon University
To begin with, lunar regolith, or dirt, is quite different from its counterpart on earth, because the geological processes it undergoes are so different. On earth, soil is exposed to constant weathering, which acts something like a tumbler, rounding off the edges of the individual grains. On the moon, however, this process is absent, so the grains resemble tiny shards of glass. And these shards are very abrasive to technology like robots and their inner workings, even more so than Martian regolith. And that’s to say nothing of the deleterious effects on human lungs.
Then there are the extremely cold temperatures to be found on the moon and the long periods over which those temperatures must be endured. Unlike the Earth and Mars, which have days and nights measured in hours, a single lunar night lasts for two earth weeks. During those two weeks, temperatures at the surface drop to minus 173 degrees Celsius (minus 279 degrees fahrenheit). That’s a long, deep freeze. Still worse are the temperatures found within the polar craters. Within the Cabeus crater at the south pole where water was discovered, temperatures plummet to an almost unimaginable minus 370 degrees fahrenheit! We’ve only recently learned that permanently shadowed areas such as Cabeus are the coldest places yet detected in our solar system.
The moon presents challenges, but Astrobotics has faced serious challenges before, and they have very interesting ideas on how to win the Google Lunar X Prize. The plan is to launch their robot late in 2012 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 heavy lifter. Red Rover will land on the lunar surface attached to its Artemis lander, and once there, they’ll set about meeting the objectives of the competition, which are to drive roughly about three tenths of a mile or roughly twice the distance Wilbur Wright flew he and his brother’s airplane during their first powered flights in December 1903. They’ll also send back video, but instead of grainy images likes those sent back to earth by Apollo 11, we’ll be seeing the surface of the moon in high-resolution 3-D!
Their expedition to capture the Google Lunar X Prize will not be a flash in the pan. Already they are drawing up plans for follow-on missions where the intent is to go after what I would call “targets of opportunity.” The opportunity was provided by yet another recent and unexpected discovery, this one made by the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya launched to the moon in 2007. By the end of 2009, it was discovered that images it had taken over the Marius Hills region on the earth-facing side revealed a curious feature, the existence of which lunar scientist have long suspected but until now had not been directly imaged.
The feature is called a “skylight.” Billions of years ago when vulcanism was active on the moon, lava flowed through tubes, some of which ran near the surface. Today, with that activity long dead, and where the roof of such a tube has collapsed, it forms an opening called a skylight. The Marius Hills Hole, as it has come to be called, presents a gaping maw of some 60 meters (197 feet) – big enough to swallow several houses. And within its recesses may lie still more water trapped by the same process that caused it to collect in the polar craters. We’ve known that there are places of permanent shadow in craters at the poles. There, where the light of day can never reach, temperatures plummet to roughly minus 370 degrees fahrenheit. In such frigid conditions, water becomes trapped. It stands to reason that within the darkness of the Marius Hills Hole, there too we will find water as well as a natural shelter against a harsh space environment.
Marius Hills Hole: 13.92 deg N latitude, 303.21 deg E longitude. Courtesy NASA
The logic is not lost on the Astrobotics team. “Yes, [the] skylight is an Astrobotics destination, and it is an early option, since that has advantages of being equatorial, favorable lat[itude] and lon[gitude] and for comm[unication], passive, and interesting to exploration,” says Dr. Whittaker. He realizes that the, “real payoffs of dwelling in or on a skylight wall will be protection from radiation, meteorite strike and extreme thermal gradients.” And though robots should never supplant humans for explorations, they can and should be our hunting dogs, at our sides every step of the way. These Astrobotics ‘hunters’ already have a well established pedigree, which places them at the head of the pack when it comes to taking on the tough terrain in and around these skylights. Dr. Whittaker points out that they are, “experienced practitioners of robot repelling.” And though the intent of the Google Lunar X Prize is not to take on this kind of exploration, follow-on missions are in the planning stages that will.
Though Red Rover will enjoy a degree of on-board autonomy, the bulk of their operations will make use of supervised teleoperation. From their command center on earth, an operator will direct the movements of the rover, driving it from place to place, or as Dr. Whittaker puts it, “safeguard and waypoint driving with visualization, oversight and intervention (when necessary) by human[s].” This is possible, because the moon is so close. The time it takes for 3-D video provided by onboard vision sensors to be beamed from the robot resting on the surface of the moon to the operator on earth and then for that operator to respond with control inputs that are then beamed back to the robot is short enough to allow real time operation: about 6 seconds for turnaround, not including the operator’s human response time. This was not possible with the Mars rovers. The time it takes for the signal to travel just one way from the red planet is roughly 18 minutes. That means that if either Spirit or Opportunity were to have approached a hazard, it would require – at a minimum – 36 minutes for that hazard to be conveyed to an earth-based operator and then commands to arrive back in time to save the rover; a design concept that would have presented far too much risk. In their case, what was required was a design that incorporated a great deal of autonomy and at a vast increase in expense over a moon rover needing only modest onboard autonomy.
But for any of this to work, there must be a reliable power source for running onboard systems, keeping them cool when exposed to sunlight and warm when exposed to darkness. And for this, there are two options. The first is called a radioisotope thermal generator, or RTG. This device has been used very successfully for decades on deep space missions where there is too little sunlight for generating electricity from solar cells. This ingenious design works, because of something called the thermoelectric effect. When two, dissimilar metal plates are brought very close together and a large temperature difference is applied between them, something very curious begins to happen. Electricity flows from one plate to the other. It’s very easy to chill one plate, because space itself is very cold. But what about the hot side? That’s where the “radioisotope” part of “RTG” comes in. A small pellet of plutonium provides all the heat necessary and is, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited supply. Spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 launched back in the 1970‘s and that have now left our solar system for interstellar space, are still provided with plenty of power by their RTGs even after three and a half decades of sustained space flight. Sadly, however, there is so much of a stigma attached to the “P” word that most missions opt not to use it unless there is no alternative. RTGs have been blown up, dropped from great heights, and suffered every conceivable type of destructive testing and in each case, passed. Still, the stigma remains, which brings us to option number two: solar cells.
The moon basks in the same, plentiful sunlight that we enjoy here on earth. But remember there are its two-week nights. And if you’re still trying to wrap your brain around that one, picture the moon as it orbits earth. It takes 28 days to complete just one of those rotations and with one side always facing the earth. It spends half that journey in darkness.
Having chosen solar cells as their power source, Astrobotics faces engineering challenges that must be overcome to use them. For the Google Lunar X Prize, it will not be necessary to survive longer than the short time it takes to complete their objectives. But successors will need to survive for extended periods. Those surface robots must bear freezing temperatures never faced by any of their predecessors and continue to function and make discoveries. And true to form, Dr. Whittaker and his team have come up with an answer: night hibernation.
“We’ve demonstrated recovery of key components like battery, computing, memory and some sensors. Our motor controllers are likely to succeed [and] our next step is to combine these into a system mockup, then to recover and operate that after sequential cryo-freezing.” The robot will land near the dawn, making use of as much of the 14 days of light as possible, and when nights comes, it will role to a stop and hunker down. Already the team has made progress with cold tolerance. Their Scarab Drillbot concept is designed for ice exploration.
One other area in which robotic precursor missions to the moon will need to concentrate is something called In-Situ Resource Utilization. The more familiar term is “living off the land.” Every pound of material brought up from earth costs money in fuel spent to transport it there, so the more material that can be extracted from the surrounding lunar environment, the less it will cost for us to live there. Here again, the Astrobotics team has been thinking ahead, stating that, “ISRU is strategic for Astrobotic and CMU.” Perhaps they could begin with something like making a single ice cube from water extracted from the Marius Hills Hole. It sounds so simple, but it will represent a monumental achievement.
In his recent novel titled Platinum Moon, Bill White shows us a world where NASA has abandoned the moon and it’s left to private enterprise to return mankind to its surface to stay. The plot sounds eerily like what we’re seeing play out in the headlines today. But whether we go back to the moon under a national flag, flying the colors of commercial logos or a bit of both, it will happen. It must happen. Without the hardship and difficulties, the failures and the triumphs of new frontiers to conquer, a society falls into stagnation. Such will be our fate if we fail to express our innate need to explore and to embrace the undiscovered country – the eighth continent, if you will – that hangs right above our heads.
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