Silver Moon: Recent LCROSS Results Show Silver, Even More Water in Cabeus Crater November 26, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Cabeus, LCROSS, NASA, silver, water , add a commentRecent results from NASA’s 2009 LCROSS mission (the famous “moon bombing”) have shown that the targeted crater continues to be full of surprises.
The mission—in which NASA crashed a spent rocket stage into a permanently-dark crater, and analyzed the resulting plume—had produced intial results indicating quite a bit of water ice, but now further results have been published showing not only more water than some parts of Earth have, but also elements like mercury and even silver.
“Where we impacted, up to 20 percent was something other than dirt. It was ices, volatiles, light metals. That was a surprise, that you had so much of this material in there.” -Tony Colaprete, LCROSS mission principal investigator, “Moon Crater Has More Water Than Parts of Earth“, Space.com
These materials probably arrived via billions of years’ worth of meteor, comet, and other impacts.
Huge quantities of water ice have been discovered elsewhere on the Moon in the past year, showing that a moon once thought to be dry has remarkable natural resources. Water can be processed for cost-effective rocket fuel (via its hydrogen and oxygen), and now with resources like silver turning up…
If there’s anything the moon has shown us in the past year, it’s that we only have an initial understanding of its resources. The prospects for lunar mining have been increasingly steadily, and they were already pretty good to begin with (with helium-3, water ice, lunar solar power, silicon, and more).
These sort of large-scale discoveries of water ice would have been pretty unthinkable even two years ago; so what kind of other resource discoveries could be waiting around the corner? An already bright frontier continues to get more interesting by the day…
And with that, here’s a favorite song of mine which is now a lot more technically accurate than it used to be:
Google Lunar X PRIZE Roundup #37 November 14, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Google Lunar X Prize, Google Lunar X Prize Roundup , add a commentThe Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition challenging private space enterprises to land a rover on the Moon. Each week, I round up all the latest developments as the teams rocket forwards and upwards…
Nov. 1st-8th produced a pretty neat batch of articles around the GLXP, including an interview with an Apollo rover developer…
- At least three teams reported completion of their NASA ILDD docs (according to @GLXP on Twitter): Next Giant Leap, Astrobotic, and Moon Express!
- Dynetics, the primary company of team Rocket City Space Pioneers, announced plans for a new prototyping facility!
- Team White Label Space announced a new commercial manager—Simon Drake!
- Aspiring Hungarian team Puli interviewed the lead developer of the Apollo rovers! They also held a neat public astronomy event.
- Wired Magazine listed the GLXP as one of six ways to “Get Rich Quick, or Save the World Trying” :)
- The Pittsburgh Times-Tribune featured Astrobotic’s place in the development of lunar mining! The team also blogged about implementation of DC/DC converters :)
- Team SELENE is marking skydive history with a little fun… :)
China Reveals First Chang’e-2 Photos! November 10, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Chang'e, Chang'e-2, China, selenography, Sinus Iridium (Bay of Rainbows), Wen Jiabao , 5commentsChina has released the first photos from it’s recently-launched Chang’e-2 lunar orbiter!
Released with some fanfare (that’s the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, there. [Editor's note: originally had Jiabao as the "head of state"; that would actually be the president, Hu Jintao, not the premier, Jiabao]), the images get more or less straight to the point: they’re of the Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridium), which China has slated to be the potential landing location of it’s Chang’e-3 rover mission.
The images include a 3-D map, and have a resolution of ~1.3 meters (for comparison, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has resolution up to 1 m [PDF]).
Check out the official Chinese release page for all the images :) (A rough translation notes the last image is labeled as “antarctic”, so it’s unclear if that’s also a Bay of Rainbows crater, or one near the lunar south pole.)
Google Lunar X PRIZE Roundup #36 November 6, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : Google Lunar X Prize, Google Lunar X Prize Roundup , add a commentThe Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition challenging private space enterprises to land a rover on the Moon. Each week, I round up all the latest developments as the teams rocket forwards and upwards…
A sad note this week, as the GLXP lost a team leader to the great beyond. As we remember Richard Speck, the spirit of this efforts thrives on:
- Richard Speck, leader of team Micro-Space, passed away in his sleep. His dream lives on, and I’m sure he’ll be watching from somewhere; my thoughts and condolences are out to all who were close.
- GLXP Gal Amanda Stiles confirmed (in the comments of a post here at Luna C/I) that team Moon Express is, in fact, an evolution of former team Chandah!
- Team SELENE announced a cool contest: launch a home rocket 500 meters, and win 500 euros!
- Team SYNERGY MOON blogged about InterOrbital Systems rocket testing :)
- Team Part Time Scientists blogged about software challenges in space!
- Team FREDNET were interviewed in an Evadot podcast :)
- Team Rocket City Space Pioneers participated in the ISPCS 2010! They were also interviewed for radio.
- Team Next Giant Leap was featured in an article about eSpace development in Boulder, CO! They also noted that business for them is hopping (rather literally), and were featured on Space.com, to boot!
SHIFTboston Moon Capital Winner and Finalists! November 4, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in : lunar land use planning, SHIFTboston Moon Capital Competition , 1 comment so farSHIFTboston has posted the winner of its Moon Capital design contest, as well as details on each of the finalists!
The competition challenged talents from a variety of fields to come up with a design for a lunar habitation or capital.
The winning entry, pictured above, is Bryna Andersen’s LPS: 2069 concept. The massive spire would rotate in a system to create Earth-normal gravity, combining with a setup to provide Earth with solar power.
Beyond that, not a whole lot more detail has been posted on the winning proposal. The other finalists, though, prove very interesting in their own right…
Menghi Zhang’s entry, for instance, gets into the design for lunar urban units:
The design tackles the lunar challenges with adaptable, modular units linked together as a network.
The conceptualised urban growth pattern across the Moon is notable: starting at Shackleton, dense in the south, and spreading a thin line north across the maria.
The second of the four total finalists is Gareth Leech’s concept, which hits some similar notes to Zhang’s:
Again, modular is the name of the game. Also valuing adaptability—much as NASA’s own Constellation Moon Base plan did—Leech’s approach tackles the realistic constraints lunar settlements will have:
“The clustering patterns of these modules are defined by the constraints of transportation, therefore establishing an incremental growth pattern which follows the traditional organic growth pattern of a new settlement.”- The entry’s SHIFTboston blog post
The last entry, from Anthony Di Mari and Alberto Govela, looks at melding lunar mining and agriculture:
The proposal utilizes existing lunar resources (titanium, and even helium-3) to fuel agricultural units.
The visual, to me, evokes The Matrix’s human farms…seeing how warm and fuzzy I am for the Moon, not quite my vision :) While it’s an interesting idea, SHIFTboston themselves concede the design is somewhat impractical, and doesn’t quite work out.
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I must say I’m partial to the practical concepts—the similarities to each other, and especially to NASA’s base vision, helps give a clearer picture of what lunar development would actually end up looking like. And, of course, a picture’s worth a thousand words…
Of the two modular designs, I like Leech’s. Zhang’s looks industrial-awesome, and (as someone with a bachelor’s in Urban Planning) I love that development pattern vision, but Leech’s strikes the realism chord; and that, in the end, is what catches my fancy. What’s the development actually going to be like? What challenges does that pose? And, what can we do before that point to help it develop smoothly (for all parties)?
So, I hand it off to you: what do you think of these? Which of the concepts are you most partial to?