A new flight plan: back to the moon

Science News, March 13, 2004 by Ron Cowen

After going in circles around our own planet for more than 30 years, astronauts may finally have gotten permission to leave home. In January, President Bush unveiled an ambitious plan for a manned mission to Mars, using the moon as a testing area and stepping-stone. But for many planetary scientists, the moon is a desirable destination in and of itself. Although the Apollo missions brought back nearly 400 kilograms of rocks, scientists still know precious little about the moon's topography, gravitational field, and overall composition.

Both manned and robotic missions could greatly expand that limited view, says James Head of Brown University in Providence, R.I. Filling in those knowledge gaps could not only make the lunar face more familiar but also provide new insight about the early history of the inner solar system, including the era when life formed on Earth, he adds.

The highest-resolution global topographic maps of the moon now available were acquired in 1994 from an instrument aboard the Department of Defense's Clementine mission. However, those maps depict the surface with an average resolution not nearly precise enough for discerning the depth of craters and elevations of mountains, let alone choosing landing sites for people.

NASA'S modest Lunar Prospector mission in 1997 didn't carry a camera, though its detectors provided a coarse map of the moon's elemental composition.

"There never was a full-fledged remote-sensing mission to the moon, so we don't have a full sense of the character of the moon's resources," says Carle Pieters of Brown University. "Our knowledge of the moon in fact is nowhere near as good as it is for Mars."

MOONSTRUCK The first step to becoming better acquainted with the moon is to send an orbiting observatory that can map large swaths with a resolution as fine as a half-meter, says Head, who worked on the Apollo missions. The six landing sites for the Apollo missions were scrutinized that closely, but these sites, all on the moon's near side, represent only a tiny portion of the lunar surface.

For a detailed look at the composition of and resources on the moon's surface, including specific minerals and possibly water, and a mapping mission would also require a spectrometer capable of analyzing moonlight over a wide range of visible and near-infrared wavelengths. That spectrometer would be similar to one now orbiting the Red Planet on the European Space Agency's Mars Express.

Such an orbiting mission would provide not only data of scientific interest but also the basics for sending people back to the lunar surface, which under the Bush plan would happen by 2020. A fleet of orbiting robots could home in on regions where astronauts might safely land. The orbiters would also identify locations where a robotic lander could extract hydrogen and oxygen from rocks and soils to create rocket fuel.

Scientists anticipate that a robotic filling station on the moon would ultimately mean that missions from Earth wouldn't have to carry the fuel needed for the return journey. At first, robots would make only a small amount of fuel to demonstrate the feasibility of the plan, notes James B. Garvin, lead scientist for moon and Mars exploration at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

From the vantage point of researchers, one of the most compelling reasons to explore the moon is to read the history of the solar system that the moon's geology chronicles, Head says. That's because the moon hasn't undergone major upheavals in the more than 4 billion years since its birth.

In that period, by contrast, Earth has had numerous facelifts. Ongoing volcanic eruptions, the shifting of the continents due to the movement of tectonic plates, and other large-scale makeovers have erased Earth's original surface.

Theorists argue that the moon formed when a Mars-size asteroid walloped the young Earth, sending into terrestrial orbit an amalgam, some of which coalesced into the moon. The moon therefore serves as "a geologic record of the formative years of our own planet, the childhood which is no longer accessible to us," says Head.

To explore that early era, there may be no better place than the South Pole--Aitken basin, a 2,500-kilometer-wide impact site on the moon's far side, says Michael B. Duke of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. Stretching from the moon's south pole to a crater 15[degrees] from the equator, the basin was excavated when a mountain-size body struck the area no later than 3.9 billion years ago. That's just around the time that life arose on Earth, perhaps triggered by a related series of impacts.

Planetary scientists have proposed that terrestrial life gained a foothold when comets or other debris bombarding Earth delivered a supply of organic material. No one expects to find life in the South Pole--Aitken basin. But mineral deposits there may reveal the composition of the material that entered the inner solar system and perhaps gave a foothold to life.

"The compositional information and information on the depth and mechanics of excavation of the basin are fundamental problems of planetary origin and history, which likely can be investigated nowhere else in the solar system," Duke reported last March at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.