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New Moon Probe Raises Questions About What to Do Next in Space

Terry Zaperach/NASA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Engineers at a NASA site in Virginia preparing an unmanned craft for its moon mission, which is set to start Friday.

The last moon mission on NASA’s current schedule — a small, unmanned spacecraft that will study moon dust and the lunar atmosphere — is scheduled to launch on Friday from Wallops Island, Va., elating scientists who study the moon but highlighting political questions about what NASA should do next.

The Smart Car-size spacecraft, which NASA calls the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, will take 30 days to get into orbit around the moon, spend the next 30 days checking its equipment and proceed with scientific work for 100 days, searching for water molecules in the atmosphere and gathering data about the curious substance known as lunar dust. Then the probe, which goes by the acronym Ladee (pronounced laddie), will take a death plunge into the rocky surface of the subject it is studying.

The results of the scientific program could be helpful in preparing for future manned missions to the moon. Although NASA currently does not have such plans, some members of Congress have called on the space agency to return to the moon rather than pursuing its current space objectives.

Although there is wide agreement that NASA should ultimately aim for a manned flight to Mars, that goal is far off. The more immediate plan, which has been criticized on Capitol Hill, is to capture an asteroid and tow it closer to home so astronauts can visit it.

But NASA has continued sending unmanned spacecraft to the moon; the coming mission will be the third to go there in five years. While scientists are excited about what the experiment may yield, they are also concerned about the absence of future moon voyages on NASA’s schedule.

“If you’re going to fly this mission with the goal of understanding the atmosphere and how dust might affect future human missions, and you don’t have the future human missions, then part of the reason for the mission disappears,” said David Kring, senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, a NASA-financed research institute in Houston.

Even if NASA sits on the sidelines, traffic to the moon will be busy. China announced last week that it would land its first exploratory rover on the moon by the end of the year. India, Japan, Russia and the European Space Agency also have unmanned missions in the works. And Google is sponsoring a competition called the Lunar X Prize, offering up to $20 million to the first company that can send a robotic spacecraft to the moon by 2015 and make it perform certain tasks.

The Ladee spacecraft was conceived when NASA was also planning new manned missions to the moon, which would have been the first since 1972. But the Obama administration canceled that program, called Constellation, in 2010, calling it over budget and behind schedule. Ladee stayed in the pipeline.

The spacecraft will search for water in the very thin lunar atmosphere, which is estimated to be 1/100,000th the density of Earth’s, perhaps similar to Mercury’s. Scientists want to find out how the ice on the moon’s poles managed to get there, said Richard Elphic, project scientist for the mission. They speculate that water molecules in the moon’s atmosphere may have migrated toward the poles and frozen in place, he said.

Evidence of water below the moon’s surface was discovered in recent years by a NASA-financed instrument aboard an Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1. Data collected from the coming mission could help complete the picture of the moon’s water cycle, Dr. Elphic said.

The orbiter will also examine the movements of lunar dust. “Dust” is a bit of a misnomer, the scientists said: the crushed debris is extremely fine but also has jagged, sharp edges, since there is no wind or water on the moon’s surface to wear it down.

“It’s certainly more annoying than terrestrial dust,” said Sarah Noble, program scientist for the mission. “It’s like shards of glass, and it sticks to everything. If it gets into your eyes or your skin, it’s abrasive and it hurts. It also really gums up machinery.”

The dust poses a risk to robots and humans alike, as it can wreak havoc on equipment and spacesuits. Understanding the way the dust moves through the atmosphere will help scientists better prepare for longer missions on the moon, Dr. Elphic said.

Not everyone agrees that dust is a major concern. “Dust on the lunar surface does not pose a serious risk to future lunar exploration,” Dr. Kring said, pointing out that astronauts managed to survive the dust without major problems. But he still saw value in the dust inquiry, saying, “We always want to reduce the risk, and to understand the dust phenomenon in and of itself is worthwhile.”

NASA said the launching would break technological ground. Previously, spacecraft were custom-made for each mission and the models were not reusable. But this spacecraft was designed for assembly-line production, so that future missions could save money by using identical components.

The spacecraft’s design and construction cost $125 million out of a mission price of $250 million, said Dwayne Brown, a NASA spokesman. If the same design were used again, Mr. Brown said, NASA estimates that the cost would drop to $90 million for the first spacecraft and then over time to $55 million each. At the moment, though, NASA does not have other projects lined up to reuse the model, he said.

The spacecraft will ride on the maiden voyage of the Minotaur V rocket built by the Orbital Sciences Corporation, one of several private contractors NASA has turned to in recent years to supply rockets for its missions. The launching will be the first lunar mission for Orbital, as well as the first moon journey departing from Wallops Island.

In 2009 and 2011, Orbital lost two NASA satellites in failed launching of its Taurus XL rocket, costing the agency more than $600 million.

For this mission to succeed, Ladee will need to launch, separate from the Minotaur V, and insert itself into lunar orbit. Then, NASA will be able to begin its experiments.

“Once we’re on the moon, we’ll breathe a big sigh of relief,” Dr. Noble said.

What is a Comet?

Comets are leftovers from the formation of the solar sytem, about 5000 million years ago. Near to the sun, small rocky planets such as Earth formed. Further out, large gas planets like Jupiter formed. Still further out, the masses of dust and ice didn't form planets. They stayed separate and formed a cloud of comets known as Oort's cloud.

Most comets are undetectable from Earth. Occasionally two comets may collide, and an icy piece of one of them falls toward the sun. The journey toward the sun takes several hundreds of thousand of years. Once the comet reaches the sun, it swings past it and returns to Oort's cloud, in as much as a million years since it left.

March 23, 1986 | 30 second exposure, started at 4:33 am local time (14:33 Greenwich Mean Time — Coordinated Universal Time [UTC]), Tahiti International Golf Course, Commune of Papara, Tahiti, French Polynesia | Kodak Tri-X film, no filter
Source: Daisy Mariposa

What is a Comet?

Comets are leftovers from the formation of the solar sytem, about 5000 million years ago. Near to the sun, small rocky planets such as Earth formed. Further out, large gas planets like Jupiter formed. Still further out, the masses of dust and ice didn't form planets. They stayed separate and formed a cloud of comets known as Oort's cloud.

Most comets are undetectable from Earth. Occasionally two comets may collide, and an icy piece of one of them falls toward the sun. The journey toward the sun takes several hundreds of thousand of years. Once the comet reaches the sun, it swings past it and returns to Oort's cloud, in as much as a million years since it left.

Short-Period Comets

Some comets orbit the sun much more frequently than what I've just described. These short-period comets have been captured by the solar system.

When a comet travels toward the sun, it passes all the planets in the solar system. Some of the smaller planets have no effect on the comet. If the comet passes too close to a larger planet—Jupiter or Saturn—it may become trapped. The gravitational force of a planet such as Jupiter or Saturn will slow the comet, leaving it without enough energy to return to Oort's cloud.

Halley's Comet is a Short-Period Comet

A comet which has been caught in the gravitational force of one of the larger planets is doomed to spend the rest of its life orbiting the sun in much less time than the one million year round-trip between Oort's cloud and the sun. Comet Halley is a short-period comet. It orbits the sun every 76 years.

The 1986 Apparition of Comet Halley

Comet Halley's most recent apparition was in 1986. Within a three-week period in March 1986, a group of six spacecraft flew past the nucleus of Comet Halley, at distances ranging from 17.4 miles to 372.8 miles. Professional and amateur astronomers, organized into nine disciplines of the International Halley Watch, monitored Halley's Comet using ground-based instrumentation. The scope and size of the international scientific community organized to study Comet Halley was unprecedented in the history of science.

International Halley Watch (IHW)

The United States Congress appropriated funding for the formation of the International Halley Watch (IHW). In 1980, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) science working group was formed to establish the objectives of the organization. NASA Headquarters established two lead centers for the IHW, one in Germany, and the other at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Nine observing disciplines (networks) were formed to encourage, coordinate, and archive the scientific data resulting from the observations of Comet Halley during its apparition from 1982 to 1989.

See all 3 photos

April 11, 1986 | 17 minute 55 second exposure, started at 3:09 am local time (13:09 Greenwich Mean Time — Coordinated Universal Time [UTC]) | Tahiti International Golf Course, Commune of Papara, Tahiti, French Polynesia | Fujichrome 400 film
Source: Daisy Mariposa

IHW Small Island Network

The International Halley Watch's Large-Scale Phenomena Team was responsible for establishing a worldwide network to observe and photograph Comet Halley. More than 90 observatories in the Northern Hemisphere had the comet in view during every hour in each 24-hour period.

The situation changed in February 1986, when Halley's Comet rounded the sun. The comet was far south of the celestial equator and either difficult or impossible to see from many northern observatories. The Southern Hemisphere is dominated by oceans. The observatories there were too far apart to continuously monitor the comet. One of the nine networks formed by the IHW's Large-Scale Phenomena Team was theSmall Island Network.

The idea of the Small Island Network was to place portable Schmidt cameras on remote islands to monitor the comet. The IHW's Large-Scale Phenomena Team only had funds to purchase the equipment. One of the most difficult aspects of the program was finding volunteers to operate the cameras. The six locations chosen to be in the Small Island Network were Tahiti, Easter Island, the British Antarctic Survey's Faraday Station on the Antarctic Peninsula, the South African Astronomical and Cedarberg observatories (both on the mainland), and Reunion Island.

My observing partner and I spent a month in Tahiti observing and photographing Comet Halley for the International Halley Watch's Small Island Network!

magined Lunar mining facility.

Source: NASA.gov, Pat Rawlings (SAIC); public domain

To the Moon In Early 2013

As of the end of 2012, North America supported 13 spaceports, with one in Canada and the reamining dozen in the USA.These ports are real and they are not all government operated. In fact, with the emergence of the NASA Commerical Crew (63 aerospace companies to date), the US Space Program took a decided turn for the private sector. The space program will go on with or without government funding.

Previously in May 2012, NASA itself had amassed a group of private sector aerospace companies to form its NASA Commerical Crew for commerical and privatized space ventures. Severasl of these companies are buidling replacements of various kinds for the US Space Shuttles retired in 2012, along with robot landers and habitat dwelling for the moon and in the furture, Mars..

Previously began ventures by Google were set to launch robot landers to the moon in early 2013, two years ahead of schedule (2015). In addition, Google joined with James Cameron and other investors to begin near-Earth orbit asteroid mining.

In late 2012, it was announced that a US astronaut, Scott Kelly and a Russian cosmonaut counterpart, Mikhail Kornienko, set to be shuttled to the ISS to complete an entire year in space in 2015. This is the longest of any long-term space living attempted to date, the current record in December 2012 being just six months. This will test the ability of the human body to withstand long-term space dwelling.

New Dreams

This is an exciting time, because even though the magic and romantic imagination of humanoids on Luna and Mars in science fiction literature was dispelled by actual exploration, we now have actual spaceports that will launch us to see what is really there and what can be built. We will have new architecture, new cultures, and new governments according to the Red Mars trilogy.

Author Kim Stanley Robinson has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards:

Can We Dream In Space?

America first heard about such long-term space travel situtations when Walt Disney released space exploration episodes of his Sunday Night TV series in the 1960s.

Astronaut candidates and others who are now called pillownauts for their sleep and long-term bed stay partication in NASA studies, underwent sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation akin to that which might be experienced in outer space.

Many of these were illustrated on the Disney shows. These and more have been explored in the excellent Red Mars trilogy of Martian colonization sci-fi books. Kelly and Kornienki will see what really happens. Speculation exists that after many months in space, the human body is unable to sleep - what effects will this have on the brain, considering the body rejuvenates and even heals most duing sleep and specially REM Sleep? Astronaut related studies in the 1950s and 1960s showed hallucinations evident after 3 days lacking sleep. What will really occur "out there"?

All of these events and more combine to comprise a need for spaceports in North America. We have them and they are ready for business. Spaceport America began guided tours in 2011 - 2012 and tenants began coming on board.