The latest episode of TMRO:Space is now available on line: Masten’s Lunar Ambitions – Orbit 11.34 – TMRO
Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems joins SpaceMike to talk about his current fleet of vehicle and plans to do more than just flags and footprints on the moon. Interview begins at 17:08
Space news topics covered:
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Bob Zimmerman tells me his book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, which tells the dramatic history of the first mission to send humans beyond earth orbit, is now available as an unabridged audiobook. From the press release:
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of mankind’s boldest adventures, the first manned flight to another world. To mark the occasion, an audio version of the first book about the mission of Apollo 8 has been released, narrated by Grover Gardner, a legend in the ears of fans of audiobooks all over the planet.
Says Valerie Anders, wife of Apollo 8 crew member Bill Anders, “When I first read this excellent account, published before the end of the space shuttle era, I was delighted.”
Now, with the advent of high quality audio books and online merchants like iTunes and Audible, and the resonant and expressive voice of narrator Grover Garner, everyone can enjoy this recording of this pivotal moment in space history.
While more recent books have been published on the mission of Apollo 8 (most of which rely heavily on Zimmerman’s work), none has captured the impact the Apollo program had on the families of the astronauts nearly so well as “Genesis – the story of Apollo 8.” The new forward to “Genesis,” by Valerie Anders, contains a moving tribute to those pilots who never returned from their missions – not as faraway as the moon, but just as dangerous and far more frequent.
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** Paul Wooster of SpaceX talked at the recent Mars Society conference about the company’s plans for sending people to Mars by 2024:
** SpaceX’s Spacesuit, up close and personal – Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, describes SpaceX spacesuits during a recent visit to the company’s HQ in Hawthorne, California:
See Up close and personal with SpaceX’s space suit – Everyday Astronaut for lots of photos.
** What it’s like to fly the Boeing Starliner CST-100 Spaceship – Dodd also recently tried out a Boeing Starliner crew capsule:
** NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine this week gave a strong endorsement of low cost reusable, commercial space transport systems, which can make a robust lunar program affordable:
More at NASA head hints that reusable rocket cos. like SpaceX will enable Moon return – Teslarati.
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The 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention starts tomorrow in Pasadena, California and will last through Sunday. Check out the schedule (pdf) packed with keynote talks and multiple parallel session tracks. There are over 40 different sessions listed in the Conference flyer (pdf).
I expect the Mars Society Youtube Channel will provide a live webcast and will later include recordings of presentations. If you are in Southern California this week, you can attend via registration at the door.
Mars Society co-founder and president Bob Zubrin previewed the conference on a recent episode of The Space Show.
One of the highlights of the event will be a debate on the utility and cost-effectiveness of NASA’s proposed Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a human-tended facility to be put into orbit around the Moon: Timely Debate on Lunar Orbit Platform-Gateway at Mars Society Convention – The Mars Society. NASA is presenting LOG-G as one of the ways to use the Moon to prove technology that will be useful later for Mars missions. Zubrin is highly skeptical that LOP-G is useful for either Moon or Mars missions.
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Deposits of water in craters on the polar regions of the Moon has been indicated since the early 1990s when the Clementine probe saw radar reflections from the surface that were consistent with water ice. The Lunar Prospector mission not long after reported neutron scattering data that also indicated large amounts of water. Evidence continued to build with further studies form missions like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. However, there were lingering doubts over the extent of the water and whether the signals were actually due more to hydroxyl (HO−) than to pure water (H2O). The water molecules might also be scattered within the dust of the lunar regolith rather than collected into solid ice.
This week a study of sensor data from the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission was released and it appears to confirm once and for all that there are in fact extensive deposits of water ice in the permanently shadowed floors of craters at the poles of the Moon. This water offers a tremendous boon for human activities on the Moon since it means an essential resource to support life is there and doesn’t have to be brought from earth at great expense. In addition water can be relatively easily split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel and for energy storage.
Ice Confirmed at the Moon’s Poles
In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.
A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, used data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.
M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we’d expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapor and solid ice.
Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.
Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice at the lunar south pole, but these could have been explained by other phenomena, such as unusually reflective lunar soil.
With enough ice sitting at the surface — within the top few millimeters — water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon’s surface.
Learning more about this ice, how it got there, and how it interacts with the larger lunar environment will be a key mission focus for NASA and commercial partners, as we endeavor to return to and explore our closest neighbor, the Moon.
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 20, 2018.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, designed and built the moon mineralogy mapper instrument and was home to its project manager.
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