Artist's rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and its upper stage Centaur rocket. Image courtesy of NASA.

Reported for KQEDnews.org.

Last year, NASA scientists in Mountain View made international headlines when they crashed a rocket into a permanently shadowed crater on the moon's south pole and announced they had found water there.

On Thursday, they unveiled new findings about the amount of water on the moon and a "treasure trove" of gases and metals buried within the lunar soil, which along with the water, could be extracted to make rocket fuel on the moon. The research appears in the October 22nd edition of the journal Science.

"If you took the 10 kilometer region around the LCROSS site, that is said to have 5 percent concentration of water, that would be equivalent to a billion gallons of water," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator on the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission to search for water on the moon. A billion gallons is enough to fill 1500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The lunar scientists now suspect that there is 50 percent more water than they had previously estimated.

Colaprete also said that given the large number of craters on the moon, which function as "cold traps" that accumulate molecules of water over billions of years, "potentially, you could have 10 to 100 times that total amount of water."

"We found some of the coldest places in the solar system and they’re on our moon. These places have temperatures that are so cold that they can preserve water ice in a vacuum for billions of years," said Michael Wargo, a chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The lunar water is thought to exist in "oases," or deposits, instead of being uniformly distributed across the moon. It also exists mainly in the form of water ice crystals.

"That's good news because water ice is very much a friendly resource to work with. It's easy to extract and turn it into a resource, you don’t have to warm it very much, you can pull it out of the dirt really easy," said Colaprete, who described a process of extraction whereby the ice-bearing lunar soil could be heated to 100 degrees Celsius to collect the water vapor.

During the live NASA teleconference, the scientists said that the amount of other materials they detected on the moon – including mercury, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, sodium and silver – may make up as much as 20 percent of the lunar dust plume kicked up by the impact of the LCROSS rocket.

Both discoveries could be instrumental in one day making it easier to set up a lunar colony, the researchers said, because of the high cost of transporting materials to the moon, which can exceed thousands of dollars per pound.

Last year, NASA shot a Centaur rocket carrying the LCROSS and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in October, they deliberately crashed the rocket at 6,000 mph into Cabeus, a cold, dark crater on the moon’s south pole that hasn’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

The impact sent up a plume of lunar soil and debris several miles over the crater’s rim, exposing it to sunlight. Meanwhile, the spacecraft collected data for four crucial minutes, allowing scientists to analyze the chemical makeup of the ejected lunar soil, before it too crashed into the crater. Since then, the LCROSS team has been sifting through the information to glean clues about earth’s 4.5 billion year-old neighbor.

So how did the water get there? According to Colaprete, it’s likely a combination of sources. One way it could have arrived is from solar wind depositing hydrogen into the lunar granules which contain oxygen atoms. Another way is from impacts by icy comets slamming into the moon, a theory supported by the observation of these other chemicals and hydrocarbons that also exist in comets.

The last manned lunar mission was Apollo 17 in 1972. In recent years, the U.S., along with Japan, China and India have launched various unmanned lunar mission. NASA is scheduled to launch two other lunar exploratory missions, GRAIL and LADEE in 2011 and 2012, respectively, to map the moon’s interior structure and further analyze the moon’s dust.

Sometime in the next several decades, a new generation of astronauts may return to set up a lunar outpost, setting the stage for future missions to Mars.

“In the next 20 years, next 10 years, you’re going to see the moon continue to expand in its diversity, and its complexity and its interest, among the communities of both laypeople and professionals and that’s going to pull us there,” said Colaprete.

Instruments currently orbiting the moon are allowing the scientists to map in much greater detail hydrogen-rich, lunar "permafrost" regions that may contain deposits of water ice and other compounds that could help support a future lunar colony.

But before that lunar colony can be set up, there has to be a more sophisticated understanding of where exactly the water is and how easy or difficult it will be to mine when it's found.

"The next step is to look at smaller and smaller scales at the lunar surface of the distribution of water as a resource," said Colaprete.

"If I were an astronaut walking along, how far do I have to walk before I find some water and how extensive are these pockets of water?"

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Artist's rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and its upper stage Centaur rocket. Image courtesy of NASA.

Originally reported for KQED News.

Last year, NASA scientists in Mountain View made international headlines when they crashed a rocket into the moon and announced they had found water there.

On Tuesday, they revealed that the water – which exists as ice and vapor – isn’t spread out in vast oceans, but rather is concentrated in oases, and that the lunar surface appears to contain a wealth of other materials, from mercury to magnesium.

Both discoveries could be instrumental in one day making it easier to set up a lunar colony, the researchers said, because of the high cost of transporting materials to the moon, which can exceed thousands of dollars per pound.

“It’s water and much more,” said Anthony Colaprete, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. “The others, from a scientific standpoint and a resource standpoint may prove to be as important or more important.”

Colaprete is the principal investigator on the mission to find water on the moon, which is known as LCROSS or the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. Last year, the scientists shot an unmanned spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in October, they deliberately crashed its rocket at 6,000 mph into Cabeus, a cold, dark crater on the moon’s south pole that hasn’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

The impact sent up a plume of lunar soil and debris several miles over the crater’s rim, exposing it to sunlight. Meanwhile, the spacecraft collected data for four crucial minutes, allowing scientists to analyze the chemical makeup of the ejected lunar soil, before it too crashed into the crater. In the nine months since then, the LCROSS team has been sifting through the information to glean clues about earth’s 4.5 billion year-old neighbor.

How wet is the moon?

“As wet as the Sahara, perhaps wetter in some places”, said Colaprete.

On Tuesday, at the third annual Lunar Science Forum at NASA Ames, researchers discussed everything from the physics of the LCROSS impact to the complex chemistry of the moon. Among their findings:

- The distribution of water on the moon is not uniform, but “chunky”, occurring in deposits in dark craters like the one LCROSS struck.
- The range of chemicals found on the moon is wider than once thought and includes mercury, magnesium, sulfur dioxide and possibly, formaldehyde, along with sodium, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide and methane.
- The total amount of water in the target site and the plume observed by LCROSS: 26 gallons

So how did the water get there? According to Colaprete, it’s likely a combination of sources. One way it could have arrived is from solar wind depositing hydrogen into the lunar granules which contain oxygen atoms. Another way is from impacts by icy comets slamming into the moon, a theory supported by the observation of these other chemicals and hydrocarbons that also exist in comets.

The last manned lunar mission was Apollo 17 in 1972. In recent years, the U.S., along with Japan, China and India have launched various unmanned lunar mission. NASA is scheduled to launch two other lunar exploratory missions, GRAIL and LADEE in 2011 and 2012, respectively, to map the moon’s interior structure and further analyze the moon’s dust.

Sometime in the next several decades, a new generation of astronauts may return to set up a lunar outpost, setting the stage for future missions to Mars.

“In the next 20 years, next 10 years, you’re going to see the moon continue to expand in its diversity, and its complexity and its interest, among the communities of both laypeople and professionals and that’s going to pull us there,” said Colaprete. “There’s a lot you can do with the moon. It’s fundamental to understanding our place in the solar system and we’ve always appreciated that and recent studies have accentuated it.”

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Google Mars view from the slopes of the Olympus Mons caldera. Credit: Google Earth

I was sitting at my computer the other day, quietly exploring minute details of the surface of planet Mars, when I realized once again that in my lifetime planetary exploration has gone from telescopic-view-only to robotic rovers poking microscopes close up at Martian geology!

Did I say quietly exploring the surface of Mars? Yes I did—and you can, too. First of all, if you're not familiar with Google Earth, please go and google Google Earth and get your free download today (this is NOT a sales pitch!). A modestly powered computer with a decent graphics card is all you need to probe every nook and cranny of planet Earth, sometimes to the detail of spotting people walking in the streets….

But there's a magic button on Google Earth (it looks like planet Saturn, for some reason) that instantly transports you to planet Mars—Google Mars, that is. It's a simple button click to explore Mars, Google Earth style.

This detailed digital Mars has been created with all of the data collected by the fleet of robots we've sent—from Viking to Mars Global Surveyor to Mars Odyssey to Mars Express to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and of course Pathfinder, Phoenix, and the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

First on my itinerary was Olympus Mons, that extinct, Arizona-sized shield volcano that rises 15 miles above the average global terrain. Swooping into the San Francisco Bay-sized caldera, I got a sense of what it would be like to be there, standing on the caldera rim. There were even strips of super-high resolution imagery provided by MRO's HIRISE camera, allowing me to hover maybe a hundred feet above the ground and see rocks and piles of sand!

Next on the list had to be that other famous gargantuan feature, Valles Marineris, the "Grand Canyon of Mars" which, if it were moved to Earth, could stretch from Oakland, California to New York City—putting Grand Canyon National Park within a day's drive of anyone in the US…. Google Earth/Mars has a flight simulation mode that allows you to pilot an aircraft over and through (and into) the terrain.

Like a kid in a science supply shop (okay, that's the kind of kid I was), next I hopped on up to the landing site of NASA's Phoenix lander, on the wide flat plains near the Northern Polar Ice Cap. Yup, those plains are really flat. To my delight, I found that someone had inserted a panoramic picture taken by the orbiting MRO spacecraft when it captured Phoenix descending through the atmosphere.

Onward, planetary explorer…. I had to feel—not just see, but feel—what the landscapes that Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring for 5 years are like. On Spirit's side of the globe, Gusev Crater, I poked about the Columbia Hills, following in the tracks of the robot. Over at Opportunity's digs, I dropped into Victoria Crater, enveloping myself in "Street View"-style panoramas that almost set my feet down on Martian soil.

Okay, I could go on telling you about my adventures on Mars for days—but since you can do it yourself now, I'll let you go to it. Have fun, and send back a postcard! (Which, by the way, you can do from Google Mars….)

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Cal Poly's CP-4 mini-satellite in orbit. Credit: The Aerospace
Corporation.

It's a classic engineering story – a garage inventor spends years working in isolation, only to produce something that gets the attention of the world. Ok, the CubeSat story may not be quite as romantic, but it does have a lot of the same ingredients.

Professors at Stanford University and Cal Poly created CubeSats – 10 by 10 by 10 centimeter mini-satellites – as enginneering projects to give their students hands-on experience. Compared to standard satellite missions, which can run hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to complete, CubeSat missions are mean to be done cheaply and quickly.

CubeSat is also a standard – a basic blueprint that any university program can use. CubeSats are actually known as "FedEx satellites," since universities can mail them to Cal Poly to arrange a ride into space. They've created launching devices called P-Pods (a box that fits the CubeSats perfectly) so they can piggyback on larger rocket launches. Once the main cargo is deployed, the P-Pod releases the CubeSats into orbit. Depending how high they are, CubeSats can orbit for more than a decade before they burn up in the atmosphere.

What started at universities has spread – NASA, Boeing and other aerospace companies all have mini-satellite programs. Despite the small size, CubeSats are actually able to do valuable research. They can space test new technology, submitting it to all the rigors of space travel like solar radiation and launch stress. Recreating those conditions on the ground can be very expensive.

CubeSats can also gather scientific data. On Tuesday, NASA will be launching Pharmasat, which they hope will be their second nano-satellite in orbit. It will carry yeast samples, and once in orbit will hit them with an anti-fungal to see if their resistance is increased in space. NASA has previously observed that some bacteria are more resistant to antibiotics in space, something that could be dangerous for future human space travel.

You can tune in on Tuesday evening for the Pharmasat launch. Three other CubeSats from Cal Poly and other organizations will also be getting a lift into space.

Listen to the Do-It-Yourself Mini-Satellites radio report online, and see our Web Extra: Mini-Satellites Slideshow.

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Yuri Alexyevich Gagarin, "Columbus of the Cosmos"

Yuri Alexyevich Gagarin was a Soviet cosmonaut.  He was the first human in space and is often referred to as "the Columbus of the Cosmos".   His spacecraft Vostok-1 orbited the Earth on April 12, 1961 for the duration of 108 minutes.   Yuri's Night, usually celebrated on April 12^th celebrates this historic first flight.

Yuri's Night also celebrates another April 12^th anniversary notable in the annals of space travel.  Twenty years after Yuri Gagarin's historic flight, the first NASA space shuttle flight, STS-1 was launched into space.  STS is short for Space Transportation System.  NASA names each flight STS with the chronological number after it.  STS-1 was launched on April 12, 1981; the shuttle orbited the earth 37 times during a 54.5 hour mission.

Since 1961, our interest in space and the exploration of its depths has magnified.  Recently NASA launched the Kepler mission.  On March 7^th, 2009, the Kepler Mission successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.  Kepler, which is a specialized telescope, was designed to find the first Earth-size planets orbiting stars within a "habitable zone". A habitable zone is an orbit around a star that would enable a planet to formulate and upkeep an atmosphere and the ability for water to form in pools on the planet's surface.  Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.  Thus from the nascent flight of orbiting our own Earth, space travels has evolved to look amongst other start.  This progress is certainly something worthy of celebration!

An exhibit on the Kepler Mission along with other NASA initiatives like SOFIA, LCROSS and NLSI fascinated guests last Thursday night.  For one guest, meeting Buzz Aldrin in person was the highlight of his night.   My favorite aspect of the evening was a 3-D rendered tour of the moon and neighboring space.  I am anxious to see what will be the new annal of space exploration when April 12^th and Yuri's Night comes around again in 2010.

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