Posted on 03/06/2006 4:19:31 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
At the south pole of the moon, a row of peaks juts from the gently sloping rim of Shackleton Crater, named for the early 20th-century Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton.
The 15-mile-wide crater and its rugged surroundings, including a vast depression created by the impact of an ancient asteroid or comet, starkly show the drama that marked the early history of Earth's companion.
Overlooked as a half-dozen Apollo expeditions landed on the moon two generations ago, the lunar south pole could figure prominently in NASA's plans to return to the moon with explorers. Satellite photos reveal that parts of Shackleton's rim are bathed in near-constant sunlight and hint that the frigid, permanently shaded recesses of the crater floor harbor ice deposits.
Side by side, the solar illumination and frozen water, deposited as comets struck the moon, offer the prospect of being an odd home away from home, with valuable natural resources that space explorers could convert into electrical power, breathable air, drinking water and even liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket propellants.
On Earth, the propellants are extracted by chilling air and natural gas. At the moon, comet ice could be separated into the two fuels with solar power.
So, by earthly standards, Shackleton qualifies as prime real estate as America looks at the moon in a new light, the first stop in a human migration to Mars and other deep space destinations.
With a permanent foothold there, pioneers could learn to "live off the land," producing some of their life-support needs and fuel to reduce their reliance on costly resupply missions launched from Earth, according to NASA experts.
If NASA indeed sends its travelers to the moon again, the goals will be starkly different from the groundbreaking Apollo missions.
"The Apollo program was very goal-driven. Get people to the moon. Get them back safely. Mission done," said NASA's Scott Horowitz, who supervises the lunar preparations as chief of the agency's exploration-systems directorate. "The big difference with the (new) exploration vision is that the moon is not the goal. The moon is a steppingstone."
Two years ago, President Bush directed NASA to chart the new exploratory course. The path will retire the space shuttle in four years and return Americans to the moon by 2020 — the first visit since the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.
Embraced by Congress late last year, the Bush strategy veers from the Apollo program's Cold War-era goal of landing American astronauts on the lunar surface to upstage the Soviet adversary.
The goal of getting to Mars will depend largely on whether the federal government has the money to see it through, and scientists complained last week that NASA is cutting corners on scientific research to save money for exploration.
Nevertheless, fans of space travel dream on, and NASA unveiled in September a $104 billion blueprint to speed the American lunar return to 2018. The plan includes a new, super-size Apollo-type capsule that would carry four astronauts, and a pair of new rockets using propulsive hardware borrowed from the space shuttle and the Saturn V moon rocket.
More recently, the lunar planning effort has begun to focus on where explorers will go and what they will do on the moon.
"Actually living and operating on a planetary body other than the Earth is something we haven't done for more than a few days at a time," said Horowitz, referring to Apollo's one- to three-day lunar visits.
"We are going to have to build those capabilities. Then the question is, are we going to build a large base, and that we don't know."
The earliest missions would place Americans on the lunar surface for a week. If strategists choose to develop a settlement, the work could get under way by 2022 and lead to astronaut stays of six months.
The space agency's recently finished Explorations Systems Architecture Study ranks the lunar south pole as a high priority for exploration and settlement.
By 2008, the region will become the focus of new, unmanned missions designed to produce a new global map of the lunar terrain in unprecedented detail and to study the surface composition for the ice deposits and other resources.
"Right now, Shackleton (crater) is our best guess as the place to go," said Paul Spudis, a lunar expert at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and the author of The Once and Future Moon. "There may be other sites that are more favorable. There are some very promising craters at the north pole. We just don't know."
Spudis was among those who first raised the prospect of comet-ice deposits in craters of the moon's poles.
He was a member of the science team that studied the radar signals collected by the unmanned Clementine mission of 1994.
For now, the south pole is one of 10 lunar sites NASA plans to evaluate for human exploration and potential settlement.
"We had groups of scientists who looked at the moon and gave us the sites they thought were of the highest priority. We had the resource folks do the same," said John Connolly, NASA's lunar lander preproject manager.
"The one site where these two communities seemed to dovetail was the south pole."
Most of the moon is illuminated by 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness. Temperatures in the dark reach 240 degrees below zero Fahrenheit; it goes up to more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun, much too hot to preserve ice. Apollo astronauts stayed in the light and used cooling systems to avoid extreme heat.
But carefully positioned at the south pole, in more moderate temperatures, a settlement of astronauts could rely on electricity generated by solar power stations built along a sunlit crater rim.
The lessons learned from mining an ice cache on the crater floor could prove valuable in preparing for expeditions to Mars.
At the Red Planet, U.S. and European missions are gathering evidence of large amounts of water frozen below the desertlike terrain.
The south pole of the moon holds scientific value as well.
Three years ago, the National Academies, a think tank chartered by Congress that advises policymakers on science, engineering and medicine, placed the South Pole-Aitkin Basin, the depression that surrounds Shackleton, near the top of its list of solar system features that should be studied.
The basin, which scientists think was created 4 billion years ago, may offer experts an unusual window into the moon's earliest geologic stage — and possibly that of the Earth, which shares the chaotic beginnings. The depression stretches for 1,500 miles across the moon's far side.
Most of what is known about the south pole region was gathered by a pair of unmanned spacecraft launched well after the Apollo-era — Clementine and Lunar Prospector in 1998-99. At least three new, unmanned spacecraft — a NASA orbiter and lander as well as an Indian orbiter with a U.S. instrument aboard — are designed to provide the mapping precision that will be necessary before astronauts return.
"These robotic missions are like scouts," said Gordon Chin, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who will serve as chief scientist for the first of the U.S. missions, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It is scheduled for launch in late 2008.
The orbiter's findings should establish the elevations of the crater rims at the pole and document the sunlit conditions over many months.
mark.carreau@chron.com
I'll be waiting for the pictures and videos.
I think we should have been there again by now.
NASA is shifting back to exploration and out of the mind-set of searching for life.
When you explore you'll find what's there. Exploration enables science.
Bush's Vision for Space Exploration is beginning.
It took a lot to turn the ship around and head it in the right direction.
Until the next administration gets in office.
Then the funding is either scaled back (or cut altogether) to show they are more fiscally responsible than the last resulting in billions being spent on a pipe dream. Unfortunately, a lot of science will lost due to funding cuts in other areas to promote this boondoggle.
Until the American public is behind this all the way, it is a multi-billion dollar waste of money.
The latest interplanetary mission costs less than a single Shuttle launch.
It cost more to move man in space than it does a machine but it's more than money.
It's nice to see pictures of little rovers tooling around on some other planet but it's the drive to put "man" there that makes us who we are. The need to reach out and really touch another planet.
That's a mission I'll be tracking as much as I can 24/7.
Yea. Sink it right to the bottom.
I've been in the "space biz" for 28 years now. I even worked on the Space Station and Space Shuttle. In my 28 years, I have heard this or variations of this, since they let Skylab burn in.
When you explore you'll find what's there. Exploration enables science.
Robotics mission give a much bigger bang for the buck. You can explore places no human can get to in our lifetimes.
Then do it right. Not step back 30 years. Unfortunately funding nuclear, hypersonic craft, SSTO, and other truly advanced methods of getting off this ball gets cut every time some congress critter yells pork. This will be no different.
It's nice to see pictures of little rovers tooling around on some other planet but it's the drive to put "man" there that makes us who we are. The need to reach out and really touch another planet.
Much more science than pretty pictures result from our interpanetary probes and rovers. I would love to see us in space, however, after 28 years of watching program after program (billions upon billions of dollars) get cut, reality sets in.
It's the manned flight people who embrace robotics and encourge melding the two.
Too bad it's always so one-sided.
Other countries see the value of conquering the Moon and are on the march.
The U.S. is just in the pack and they better stay the course.
And I understand you've been in the business for years. A lot of people have and their opinions differ from yours.
Flapdoodle. The average "Joe" out there could care less IMHO.
It's a large part of the science community that doesn't want their piece of the pie redirected to actually moving off planet.
Not true. Most of the guys I work with love space exploration.
I'm sure you've seen all the whining articles and protests about the "slashing and cutting" of their missions. It's hysteria about THEIR work, not concern for space exploration.
Since I am in the middle of this, I can and do disagree from personal experience.
People like going with humans. No matter how much NASA has packaged and advertised robots, they just don't get the ticker-tape parades and ratings.
Actually, people at the moment don't care.
But then a lot of scientists don't want people in space, all they want is to send probes and be funded for the rest of their working lives.
You slander an entire community and my colleagues. Not a single one I work with falls into your category.
"Resource-rich lunar south pole is seen as perfect area to explore"
Even if the surface were littered with cut diamonds, I doubt that it would be cost effective to obtain "resources" from the moon.
It's not an either/or problem. The amount of money we spend on robotic probes is small compared the the uncertainty in the manned space budget.
If it were an either/or problem, I'd get rid of the manned program, because it has produced so little of value, whereas the returns of the robotic missions have been huge. Even as public entertainment, the robots hold their own against the astronauts. For every poster of the ISS hanging on somebody's wall, there are probably ten from Voyager and a hundred from Hubble.
But here's the kicker: I don't make a dime from any of that. Go figure.
NASA, astronomers, and the establishment of research priorities
***........Moving forward, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate needs to develop a mechanism to integrate the agency’s mission priorities with the community’s science priorities. NASA and the science community have come to depend on one another. The agency cannot return to an Apollo-like posture where the science priorities are driven almost entirely by the needs of the space flight program. On the other hand, the scientific community must realize that a healthy, vibrant exploration program is incomplete without a viable human spaceflight capability. By working together, NASA and the community should be able to maintain the remarkable success of the past decade while successfully implementing a new program of exploration.***
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/572/1
Man, this should have happened 30 years ago! I hope this program goes through, and then, on to Mars! Theres a whole Universe out there... billions of galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars in them!
The idea is to learn to live off planet and use the resource in space. A lot of technology will evolve and a lot of scientific discoveries will come with this exploration.
Robotic probes are great but moving into space involves people in space.
By building capability on the Moon it can finally happen.
"Administrator Griffin chose to disband NASA’s advisory committees until he could rework how they functioned. Historically, the advisory committees have been the venue in which the agency’s top-down priorities and the community’s bottom-up priorities have been brought together. NASA has reestablished the NASA Advisory Council, but without its previous scientific subcommittees are in place. Without these committees, it is unclear how or whether the scientific community is able to have input into NASA’s decision-making process when decisions need to be made on a short timescale."
Exploration is one thing. Strategy is another. We need to take the highground - the area of the moon with water - before the Chinese do. The nation who owns this spot will eventually own the Solar system.
We should send in the robotic base-builders now.
Believe me the scientific community has a lot of input, in fact they think they should have all the input.
It would seem, Administrator Griffin is working to get some balance inorder to hear everyone's concerns.
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