Is NASA Planning To "Terraform" Part of the Moon? Not Quite 65
MarkWhittington writes: A story in Popular Science suggested that NASA is mulling a plan to "terraform" part of the moon. The term is more than a little misleading, as it implies making a portion of the moon livable for humans. The actual plan, being funded by the space agency as part of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program is exciting nevertheless. The idea is to deploy reflectors around the rim of the Shackleton Crater, a region at the moon's South Pole where ice is thought to exist in permanent shadows. The reflectors would focus light onto select areas to provide power for robotic explorers. In this manner, the robots would not have to be equipped with protection against the cold inside the crater and would not have to be powered by plutonium-fueled RTGs. Temperatures inside the shadowed regions of Shackleton plunge to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fun stuff.... (Score:3)
Just hope they don't end up vaporizing away all the (currently solid) H2O before we can capture it.
Re:Fun stuff.... (Score:5, Informative)
You could have RTFA and saw the bit where it says
The strategy would be to send rovers into Shackleton, powered by the reflected solar light, and set up a kind of base of operations within the crater. Then the rovers would make forays into the darkened regions under battery power to prospect for ice. They would return to the illuminated spots to warm up and recharge. Later, the same arrangement would be made for mining robots, extracting the ice for use by human settlers.
They don't plan on shining sunlight on the ice
Re:Fun stuff.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw that bit - what I didn't see was hard data on where the ice actually is (because nobody knows), or any estimation of what the solar reflection into the crater will do to peak temperatures within the crater. With any luck at all, things won't be getting out of hand, better to try than not to try. But, if we are fortunate and the ice is deposited as thin frost on the cave entrances, we'll have to be careful to charge the rovers a good distance from the caves to avoid sublimating too much away (sublimation point of H2O in hard vacuum is 150K, or -123C / -190F). Even driving a "warm" rover into the cave might start the process...
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Sounds like needless complexity when you could just put an RTG in the fucking rover instead.
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Sounds like needless complexity when you could just put an RTG in the fucking rover instead.
How is an RTG less complex than a reflector? RTGs involve handling plutonium isotopes. Oh, and those isotopes don't currently exist, but let's just forget about that for now. Assuming the proper isotopes did exist, preparing an RTG for launch is very expensive. If the launch is delayed, the RTG continues to generate heat and decay as it sits on the shelf. RTGs are heavy and require even heavier shielding. That raises lauch costs, and more importantly raises lunar landing difficulty and cost. RTGs gen
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That raises lauch costs, and more importantly raises lunar landing difficulty and cost.
Or you could just use a solar panel and a reflector.
Because multiple launches are free and increase reliability...?
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We are running out of fuel for RTGs and will not have any more until we start producing a lot of weapons grade Plutonium because the fuel is a byproduct of the process. It make a lot of sense to develop alternatives
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If this water can be made use of, both as water for crew and fuel for space ships it's already where it can be helpful.
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Go, do, learn, do some more. We've been sitting on this rock, theorizing, for hundreds of years, and all it got us was a couple of lousy atomic bombs.
Getting out and actually going to the Moon got us more "useful for mankind" tech in 10 years than the equivalent amount of resources spent in "think tank" academic institutions did in the previous 100. Look at life in 1960 vs 1860. Then look at life in 1980 vs 1970. We need the academics, but they need to get out and stretch their legs "in the real univers
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1970 = Led Zeppelin
1980 = Disco
Progress?
Though now that I think about it, the last man on the moon was 1972, and that's when things started going downhill. Maybe you're right, let's terraform the moon, bitches!
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Don't know where you lived, but in West-Central coastal Florida, disco died, hard, in about 1979.
A lot of the 1970-1980 period was the early deployment of technologies (microchips, digital recording and communications, fiber optics, spandex) that would be put to better use in later decades...
That late 60's early 70's culture did have a lot of influence from the "blows my mind" kind of things that were being done at the time. Terraforming, space elevators, and high-speed interplanetary travel could bring tha
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Establishing a lunar ice mining operation is actually the first, necessary step into building the much needed Cislunar Infrastructure [cislunarnext.org] that will power our future forays to Mars, Venus and the Asteroid Belt ; as well as sustain our existing LEO and GEO infrastructure in a more efficient way.
The Shackleton Crater is the perfect place to have permanent solar power as well as solid ice. From there the water and ice can be turned into bipropellant and brought to the Moon's L2 point, and from there you can pretty [blogspot.fr]
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Lol :
America must lead this movement of humanity into space lest other powers that do not share our values and belief system fill this leadership vacuum.
Do they mean the USSR is about to form again? or what?
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Fahrenheit? Do they still measure the distance in fathoms? Force in pounds?
don't worry, surely the next CSS will have support for unit conversions
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Are they still using musty old units that were spun up out of nothing during the French Revolution? That metre that was supposedly a perfect multiple of the earth's radius? (oops!) What happened to the 10 month calendar?
I have several French coins from the era, when they thought they had done a big enough thing to start renumbering the calendar years. Coins for a little while were numbered 'The year 2' and 'the year 3' and so on.
Those dumb Revolutionary Committees. All we have left from their little ego
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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Straw Man of the year!
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All we have left from their little ego trip (the French reset and did their revolution again a few times since then) are their arbitrary units of measure that aren't scaled to anything particular in the human experience.
And your proposal is... what? The cubit?
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The SI units are the only ones left that actually have external definitions.
All the US customary units are defined only as so-and-such many of the relevant SI unit.
Most SI units are now defined such that you could explain the definition to a hypothetical space alien by radio and they could reproduce them exactly. "Oh right, I see, and that's a 'metre' is it? OK. Well, the space ship we're sending you instructions for needs to be 316.2 of those metres long, got it?"
The only one left is the kilogram, still pr
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And what's that in SI units? (Score:1)
Sheesh guys, get with the times already.
-173.333 Celsius (Score:1)
-280 f is -173.333 c.
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100 K
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:)
launch cost mirrors vs. a teeny tinny PU RTG? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mirrors? Really?
WTF. Just make the damn plutonium-fueled RTG's happen instead.
Yeah, I know: :) Why the hell not.)
-Because: launching radioactive evilness will kill everybody. (This time, unlike the last 28+ times we have done it.)
-Because: The DOE or whoever does not have enough refined PU238 these days. Boo Hoo, make some more, damn it.
Are we a first world country with functioning space and nuclear energy programs or not? (Maybe we should outsource RTG's to SpaceX too? Once Elon Musk has some breeder reactors in the corporate fold he is pretty much ready to get the white cat, island fortress, and inscrutable henchmen.
While we are at it, that is: sending mass up and mucking around on the rim of a permanently shadowed crater.
Why don’t we send up some pipe, a thermal fluid, turbine, etc. with reservoirs on the sun side and shade side of the rim. Not sure how efficient a Stirling engine really is, but permanent shade and direct sun sound pretty ideal. We could even beam power to the damn rovers, making Nikola T. happy.
Mirrors, uhg.
Re:launch cost mirrors vs. a teeny tinny PU RTG? (Score:5, Funny)
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The sun will last longer than the plutonium.
I guess when your only tool is a shotgun, everything starts to look like a clay pigeon.
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The Pu will last longer than the rovers it's installed in. Your point?
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Isn't that a reason not to use Pu?
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Will the reflectors last as long as the plutonium tho? Although there is no weather on the moon, there is still dust thrown up from activity on the surface (meteorites etc) which will coat the reflectors and reduce their efficiency over time.
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Ummm... actually, I believe the plutonium production reactors are mostly shut down, these days. Something about not antagonizing the 3rd world countries who we also want to shut down their enrichment programs?
Yeah, it's better. Yeah, I wish we could have neighborhood nukes providing our electricity instead of coal fired slag pile makers, but there is something intrinsically lacking in our education system of the last 50 or so years where we can't even convince 1/2 the people that doing something to slow d
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there is something intrinsically lacking in our education system of the last 50 or so years where we can't even convince 1/2 the people that doing something to slow down global warming is a good idea.
Oh we can, it just has to be wind or solar because they're too stupid to understand that nuclear could ever be safe.
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http://science.slashdot.org/co... [slashdot.org]
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Seems rather inefficient to launch multiple RTGs, one for each robot. Maybe they could have one set up as a recharge station, but then they would have to have a complicated recharging mechanism that would be prone to failure. In fact a single failure of that charge station could scupper everything.
Solar makes much more sense. Mirrors are cheap, there can be lots of them. They can deliver power to a wide area, or multiple areas. With a simple motor mechanism they could even move their delivery zone around. M
Orbiting the moon (Score:2)
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A geosynchronous satellite around the Moon?
It turns out that the required distance for this is outside the Moon's sphere of influence. Placing a satellite at the L1 Earth/Moon Lagrange point might work better.
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Yes, the first artificial satellite to be put into lunar orbit was the Soviet Luna 10 [wikipedia.org] in 1966. There have since been a number of others, such as Japan's Selene [wikipedia.org], which orbited from 2007-2009 to do mapping and various such things. There are some oddities [nasa.gov] to low lunar orbits, though.
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Terraforming... (Score:1)
Regrettably, the efforts to Lunaform the Earth are at a more advanced stage ;-)
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More important, they don't even say how many rods wide the crater is.
Celsius (Score:2)
For those of use that don't speak in archaic measurement:
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp... [google.co.uk]
(-280F =~ -173C)
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If the headline is a question (Score:2)
The answer is always no.
I'm a little confused (Score:1)
1) this crater is interesting because it's been dark at the bottom forever, meaning it's likely that water ice has accumulated.
2) in order to explore it, we're going to DIRECT LIGHT INTO THOSE DARK PLACES.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but doesn't that seem just a trifle stupid?
If you're going to need power to the rovers, wouldn't it make more sense to land a solar array OUTSIDE the crater, and then broadcast power in to the rovers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]