Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - To The Moon With the Lunar Prospector

Episode Date: October 13, 2003

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This is Planetary Radio. Music Matt Kaplan here. Last week we celebrated the departure of Smart One for the Moon. But almost six years ago, another groundbreaking spacecraft headed for our nearest neighbor in space, performing beautifully in spite of a price tag that was a tenth or less

of what had come to be expected for such a mission. Today on Planetary Radio, we'll look back at the lunar prospector and more with Alan Binder. Later, Bruce Betts and I will worship at the altar of Venus in What's Up? But first, Emily is still kicking up the dust on our loony friend. I'll be right back.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. We're continuing from last week's question, which discussed whether mining helium-3 on the Moon was technically feasible. The answer was yes, but it raised another question. What law applies to companies working on the Moon? What laws are in place to stop companies from polluting the surface and turning the Moon into a garbage dump? The short answer to those questions is that there aren't a lot of laws

governing the conduct of private companies on the Moon. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which has been ratified by 96 countries, is that there aren't a lot of laws governing the conduct of private companies on the Moon. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which has been ratified by 96 countries, prohibits national appropriation of lunar territory. But the Outer Space Treaty does not outlaw private property rights. Virtually all international space law is directed at countries, not companies. However, the Outer Space Treaty does prohibit the harmful contamination of the moon and other planets,

which would seem to put some limits on turning the moon into an industrial waste site. The Outer Space Treaty also requires nations to supervise the activities of their nationals, so United States law and regulation would govern the operation of U.S. companies on the moon, while Japanese companies would be governed by Japanese law. Where conflict develops between nationals of two countries,

resolving it would become a diplomatic issue between the governments involved. Is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty the last word on laws governing industrial activities on the moon? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. radio to find out. Astronomer and planetary scientist Dr. Alan Binder wanted to go to the moon, so he did. If only it had been that simple. He left a distinguished NASA and Lockheed career with the belief that planetary exploration could be done faster, better, and cheaper. It took years, but eventually his efforts resulted in the very successful Lunar Prospector mission. It also led to his creation of the Lunar Research Institute in Arizona, where he continues as director and president of the board. I called him at his

home Saturday morning and asked how he had created a moon mission on the paltry sum of $63 million. a moon mission on the paltry sum of $63 million. Well, that's an interesting question. By keeping it simple, by using existing hardware and existing components, basically by having one person in charge, no bureaucracy. Why the moon? Well, the moon, of course, has a lot of scientific value from the standpoint that it's an entire world. Its birth is connected with the formation of the Earth, the evolution of the Earth,

and it offers us tremendous knowledge. And if you look at the things that we are doing on Mars and elsewhere, the roots of understanding and understanding what to actually look for really start coming from the Apollo program. And we've just scratched the surface of the moon, literally. So to speak, yeah. So we've got a whole world to explore in terms of understanding how it formed and evolved.

And all those things help to understand the rest of the planet. It's one planet out of five terrestrial planets. The other point is it offers a lot for science in general. There's physics that you can do there. You've got natural laboratory for cosmic ray studies. You've got a vacuum. You can build

naked colliders and all kinds of stuff and there's biological science at low g and all that but to me the main purpose of the moon other than scientific uh is a place where we can go elsewhere from and use its resources to do that i firmly believe that especially with the water uh that the moon opens up the rest of the solar system. I've likened it to San Francisco Harbor or New York Harbor or the city of London on the time. Once you've got a natural place from where you could go other places, you could do that. So the moon really opens up the rest of the solar system.

That's why I'm always somewhat annoyed to see the supposed conflict, moon or Mars. It's really Moon and Mars. You are, as we said, the founder, director, president of the board of the Lunar Research Institute. Correct. Which is a fairly small organization, but one with big plans, and certainly if you include Lunar Prospector, big accomplishments. Right. Well, the Institute is actually a follow-on,, as you probably know, Lunar Prospector

was started as a private effort way back in 88. And when we were having a volunteer group in Houston to do the engineering and science, we started Lunar Exploration, Inc., which was a non-profit tax-exempt corporation to cover ourselves. Exploration Inc., which was a non-profit tax-exempt corporation to cover ourselves. And when Lunar Prospector was selected for flight by NASA, I, of course, did that with Lockheed, we killed the original organization, which was what our lawyers told us to do. And then as the mission was getting towards flight, I wanted, of course, to have my own institute, as everyone does,

and restarted, if you will, the old company under a new name. It started happening, what, in the mid-'90s that NASA looked at your proposal and said, yeah, we're going to make this, what, the third Discovery mission? Well, kind of yes and kind of no. As I said, Prospector was a private effort to make a demonstration flight. We felt that NASA missions were too costly and took too long to do, and so we wanted to try and have a private effort to philanthropically do the mission, give the data to NASA, and say, hey, there's a better way of doing this stuff. NASA was rather cold towards our efforts, as you might know or might expect,

and we did not want to approach NASA for help, although we cooperated with them, of course, because they were going to get the data, and we certainly didn't want them putting a stop on it. They really gave us no encouragement, and so we battled along trying to raise the money, and as you well know from the Planetary Society, it's very hard to raise any kind of money. And how? But then parallel to our efforts, and I think I'd like to jump back, one of the early memos that I wrote to our partner, which was the Space Studies Institute in Princeton, was that we wanted to show you could do missions quicker and less expensively and better.

And, of course, that's faster, better faster better cheaper which NASA was also beginning to develop right when the announcement for the discovery program came out and said the scientists could propose their own mission we had to put a mildly exhausted every legal possibility of getting funding for the mission and so I asked Lockheed I worked a Lockheed at that time by the way although everything done on Prospector was done privately. And so I asked Lockheed if they would support my proposal, and they decided they would. And of course, we were selected for flight, and that's how it all got started. And was this kind of a departure for Lockheed as well, which is certainly a rather large, to say the least, aerospace contractor,

which is used to dealing with contracts 10 or 100 times as big as the budget for Lunar Prospector. Yes, it was, and that was kind of amusing. When I approached the New Business Council, a number of things had happened. First of all, at that time, the space program was slowing down. Contracts for aerospace were slowing down. Even though the big companies didn't want to see the handwriting on the wall, it was kind of there. And so I proposed the mission, and the council said, well, if we're going to do this, it's going to take the best that Lockheed has because you want to do this so inexpensively and so quickly. And the interesting thing is I'm sure you know of the skunk works at Lockheed.

Oh, sure. Well, you see, they've done this for years, but that's one little group off by itself. And the interesting thing is, I'm sure you know of the Skunk Works at Lockheed. Oh, sure. Well, you see, they've done this for years, but that's one little group off by itself. So it's not the normal corporate way of doing things. Yeah, we should say the Skunk Works, of course, is this almost mythically famous group at Lockheed, which has developed truly incredible missions. I forget the fellow, the engineer who ran it for so many years. My mind goes black.

Yeah, somebody, one of our listeners will write in and remind us of that. But some of the most incredible advancements in aerospace have come out of it. Yeah. Blackboard. They've done incredible things. So Lockheed internally knows how to do this. It's just that's not how they make their profit. But in any case, another comment was made, which was very, very true,

and that was you're going to have to act like a small company within a big company. And we succeeded in doing that. So our little group, which was only at maximum at any one time about 30 people, worked really as a little bitty independent company within the big company. They think that there were frictions. Obviously, you still have to put up with the bureaucracy. But we were given, and as principal investigator, I was given the authority to do the mission the way I proposed it. And although there was quite a bit of resistance within Lockheed and within NASA, because NASA really wasn't serious about giving a PI full control of a mission.

That was PR hype. But I was intent on keeping it. Everything was done unorthodox. We had one spacecraft. There was no test equipment in the sense you usually build a test model and check it out. We built flight hardware from scratch. But everything was, again, done using existing concepts, things that had been proven in the pioneer days, you know, way back 20, 30 years ago. pioneer days, you know, way back 20, 30 years ago.

Jim Benson, who you probably know, made the comment that, well, NASA does a leading-edge technology for its missions. Alan's doing a trailing-edge technology. And that was exactly the point. Everything I flew was flight-proven, and it worked. It was, we went single-string. I don't know if you know that or not. There were no backups in the spacecraft. No, I didn't know that.

And as you may know, one of the purposes of Prospector was to demonstrate the commercial viability of exploration, lunar exploration. And as I told reporters and interviewers, your car doesn't have two motors. It doesn't have eight wheels. It doesn't have two of everything. It has one of everything. And that's how you go commercial. So we built Prospector with very good people, with good hardware. Some of the stuff was 20 years old in the sense that it had flown way back on TRW satellites, you know, 20 years earlier.

Everything was simple. There was no computer on the spacecraft. I ran it from the ground sending one command at a time. That way you had no software to develop. There was nothing that could basically go wrong. And it all worked. It all worked essentially perfectly. I mean, there were, you know, obviously no mission goes absolutely perfectly, but compared

to most missions, and given that ours cost $63 million for the primary mission, we had no troubles at all. On your website, you say that you basically got about, what, 10 times as much, or was it more a qualitative thing, 10 times as good science? Yeah. There's a little story behind that in the sense that I'm not a very cautious person when it comes to doing things and sticking my neck out. I don't believe you oversell your product.

And so when my co-investigator said that the gamma-ray spectrometer and the magnetometer would do such and such i sort of pulled back and said well okay you know i think it will will produce this much and this quality data this resolution and unknowing to me my co-eyes were being cautious too and had sort of told me the minimum so we had minimum squared when we wrote the proposal and still those numbers were well within what the community would have expected. Because of prospector simplicity, for example, as you know, it's a simple spinner. It had booms that were two and a half meters long.

The instruments were isolated. We had a magnetically clean spacecraft. We were measuring one nanotesler field, and that's almost unheard of but because of its very very great simplicity and the fact that it was small there was virtually no interference from the spacecraft as you know gamma rays are generated when cosmic rays strike anything of course you want the gamma rays that come from the moon but the spacecraft generates gamma rays also but by having booms at a very small mass uh the spacecraft had a very, very low background. So our data were extremely clean.

We, of course, were there for 19 months in very low orbits. So our data were much better than we anticipated. Let me stop you there because when we come back, I want to talk about that data and, in particular, this wonderful finding of ice, water ice, at the poles of the moon. We're talking to Dr. Alan Binder, who runs the Lunar Research Institute staff and was more responsible than anybody else for the Lunar Prospector mission, which back in 1998 and for the 19 months following that, did some rather amazing and incredibly inexpensive research at our companion called the moon.

We'll be right back. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets.

We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. ORG, the Planetary Society, exploring new worlds.

We're back with Planetary Radio. Our guest is Dr. Alan Binder. He is a lunar and planetary scientist, more than 40 years of experience, working for NASA and well outside of NASA, and was a principal investigator on the 1976 Viking Mars lander mission, a slightly more expensive mission than his own Lunar Prospector mission. Let's talk a little bit more about what Lunar Prospector found, Alan, because really that's why you went to the moon with this little probe,

and that's why the Lunar Research Institute exists, I believe. Kind of. The real purpose of Lunar Prospector,, I hinted at earlier, was a demonstration. A proof of concept. Proof of concept. Proof that you could do missions without giant bureaucracy. You could do it in NASA's phraseology, faster, better, cheaper. See, I've been a proponent of the idea that scientists should run science missions. I've argued with NASA for years that in all other fields of endeavor, physics, high-energy physics, particle colliders, astronomy, you name it, the programs are run by an experienced senior scientist and not by managers or engineers.

And so that's what we've kind of set out to do, saying, hey, you just don't need all this bureaucracy. You don't need leading-edge technology. We need to do things faster, better, cheaper. As I always said, those are the main objectives, plus showing you could do these things so reliably and well that you could actually do them commercially. But as I said, the only way we're going to prove that is by getting excellent science.

So yes, and as a lunar scientist, obviously, I'm very, very interested in the moon. But this was never in my mind or in the mind of those colleagues of mine who started this years and years ago, a science mission. It was a demonstration. And the purpose of my institute, by the way, I have a company, which is the engineering side, a for-profit company, Lunar Exploration, Inc., which if we ever did what I wanted to do, and that's commercial missions, we would do the engineering and build the spacecraft, of course, the science side, we'd do the science and help with the missions.

As you said, we did get an enormous amount of good science. As we were discussing before the break, part of the reason the science was so good is I had a spacecraft designed for science. Now, as someone who's been around the Planetary Society for a long time, you're well aware that NASA builds spacecraft and adds science instruments. And I built a science spacecraft around the science instruments. So it was absolutely there to support the science. And so the quality of our data was far better than we promised NASA.

Our gamma-ray spectroscopy and our neutron, especially the neutron spectroscopy, is at the 1% level, which you can't really get any better. It's really just an amazingly good data set. Of course, the purpose was to do global mapping, and we completely mapped the composition of the Moon in terms of those elements that the gamma-ray spectrometer could map. The neutron spectrometer combined with the gamma-ray was looking for the water ice, and I know that you want to get to that. In addition, we completely did a gravity map of the Moon, and our data

were so good that we could use the harmonic analysis to discover mass concentrations or mass on the far side. Prior to Prospector, everyone assumed that when you talked to the gravity guys, Bill Sjogren and the other people, you had to have a comm satellite or a subsatellite to get data from the far side, you simply could not get far side gravity. Well, again, I had a very simple spacecraft that was spinning, no perturbations whatsoever. We only had to burn for orbital maintenance, burn once every two months during the nominal mission.

And so we had enormously long arcs of data. And our accuracy was about, in terms of the Doppler data, were about five times better than you need to do Doppler mapping. The sea was about, in terms of the Doppler data, were about five times better than you need to do Doppler mapping. And so as a result, when you did the harmonic analysis of the entire moon, the higher order features or the Mascot simply fell out of the data. There you go.

Before we run out of time here, let's follow that water, which other people had suspected, right? Right. It had been postulated way back before Apollo, actually, as I recall, that water might be frozen in a shadowed region of the moon, because comets have brought water to the moon, even though the moon itself is anhydrous, because it was born very, very hot. It was still possible for the last two billion years that water had accumulated in these regions. As you may know, Clementine made one observation, which hinted at a deposit of water at the South Pole.

Yeah. But that was very, very inconclusive. And I'm not trying to knock Clementine because I think it was a heroic attempt. But, you know, one data point doesn't make a story. So one of our instruments, the neutron spectrometer, was specifically designed to attack that question. We found that there was, you know, the expected signal from water, a very, very small amount. The original estimate suggests there could be enough to fill Lake Erie.

We found enough of it is water ice to fill a little lake about 2 kilometers square and 30 meters deep. It's about 300 or a few hundred million metric tons of water, which is very modest, but it's still there. But still enough that it would be awfully useful. It would be awfully useful, and certainly scientifically it's of interest. But yeah, again, if one goes back to the point, the prospect was meant to open up commercial lunar exploration, that includes getting man back and exploring the moon and using its

resources to stay on the moon and to go beyond, i.e. to Mars and elsewhere. So yes, this is a significant find, but I do have to say our instrument doesn't say it's water. It's hydrogen in some form. We believe it is water ice deposits, but even if it weren't, we can get plenty of oxygen from the rocks and use that hydrogen, if it is just solar wind-implanted hydrogen, to make water.

So no matter whether it's water ice or, or solar, wind, and planet hydrogen in the cold areas, it's an extremely valuable resource. We could go on talking about the findings by Lunar Prospector for probably an hour, but we only have a couple of minutes left. I wonder if in the 15 years since the beginning of the Lunar Prospector mission, if you feel like your community of people who want to do so much more in space, do it cheaply and do it commercially, has grown. I mean, you mentioned Jim Benson, a former past guest on this show.

I think of lots of other folks out there, the people going after the X Prize. Were you kind of a pioneer? Yeah, in the sense that you kind of a pioneer yeah yeah i've had in the sense that question dot uh... it's interesting that almost everyone's pushing putting commercialization are people accepting myself are outside the national science

uh... or outside the kids i think general science generally don't think terms of commercial uh... activity uh... i concluded quite some time ago that if you don't make money on it, you ain't going to do it. And so that's one of our reasons for pushing this. I would mention that the entire Lunar Prospector story from start to finish, all ups and downs, the triumphs, the tragedies, et cetera, is in a book that I've written. It's actually a two-volume book called Lunar Prospector Against All Odds.

It'll be coming out within nine months, and it's being published by Publish America. The purpose of this book is multiple purposes, of course, but one, to tell the story so that people can see what it really takes to do a mission, especially one that's outside of NASA initially. Secondly, as many people well know, I'm an extreme critic of NASA, and it exposes the types of things that were unfortunately exposed during the Challenger and the Columbia disaster. But it gives a firsthand account of these things. There is an outline of the book, the chapters in the two volumes, on your website.

Yes. And given the cost of publishing a lot of pictures, there's a photo essay on that website, which are the pictures that go along with the book, too. So I hope listeners will take a look at that and potentially buy the book and see what's going on. Alan, do you put you on the spot? Do you remember the URL for the Lunar Research Institute website?

The URL? The address, your web address. Oh, it's lunar-exploration.net. Lunar-exploration.net. And, of course, we will have that web address, a link to the Lunar Research Institute site on the Planetary Society site, where this program can be heard.

Alan, we're out of time. I hope that we can do this again sometime, because I know that the Lunar Research Institute certainly didn't finish its work with Lunar Prospector. No, it didn't, and I'd be more than happy to talk to you again. We'll look forward to that very much, and I hope it can happen in the near future. Thanks again for joining us. Well, thank you for inviting me. I'll be back with Bruce Betts right after Emily finishes her own lunar prospecting. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A.

At the beginning of this show, we talked about the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. But have there been any further efforts to create international law governing the exploitation of other planets? The answer is yes, but the effort hasn't been very successful. The United Nations adopted the so-called Moon Agreement in 1979. The Moon Agreement reaffirms many of the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty and provides that the Moon and other celestial bodies should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, that their environment should not be disrupted,

and that the United Nations should be informed of the location and purpose of any station established on those bodies. In addition, the Moon Agreement states that the Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind, and that an international regime should be established to govern the exploitation of those resources when such exploitation is about to become feasible. But because this agreement is so far-reaching, it has only been ratified by nine states – Australia, Austria, Chile, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Uruguay. So, as of now, only market forces prevent private companies from exploiting lunar resources. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up with the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Bruce Betts. Bruce, how old were you when you became a member of the Society? I was actually the same time that they filled in the name on my birth certificate. So you were indentured from birth. I was. No, this is not actually true, but it was destined from birth. I was 14 or 15.

But very young. I'm asking because I just heard from Bruce's wife, you were almost like a charter member. I was. I was almost like a charter member. And now you help to run the place. Well, I try. Well, tell us what's up. Well, there are four planets you can see up in the sky these days, although some are kind of tricky.

The easiest is still Mars, but, boy, it's fading fast. During the course of this month, it's going to very much fade, but it's still brighter than anything else out there, certainly in the evening sky right now. See it in the southeast at sunset. You can also look for Venus extremely low on the horizon in the west-southwest right after sunset. And in the pre-dawn hours, you can see Saturn high in the south at dawn and Jupiter in the east-southeast at dawn. Also, if you're having trouble finding Saturn, look on the night of the 16th, 17th, and it will be near the gibbous moon.

Saturn's rising around midnight these days. There are planets coming out to play with us, and, in fact, there will be a whole horde of them as we approach winter. How about this week in space history? October 19, 1967, Mariner 5 flew by Venus. And then, October 15, 1997, Cassini was launched. Cassini is still making its way to Saturn and going to get there in just a few months.

Looking forward to it. Yeah, part of what's going to make there in just a few months. Looking forward to it. Yeah, part of what's going to make 2004 a really spectacular year for planetary exploration. Big year in planetary exploration. How about random space fact? Well, that was subdued. Do it again. All right, all right.

Random space fact! Ah, that's much better. Thank you. Okay. It takes light 1.5 seconds to travel to or from the Earth's moon. A little bit of moon random space fact. That includes any type of radio transmission, communication-type signals. One and a half seconds one way to the moon. Which those of us old enough to remember the Apollo landings remember that that had its effect on conversations between Earth, between mission control, and the astronauts, which

was quite noticeable, and I guess will be much more noticeable when we make it out to Mars. Yes, yes. I guess we'll be much more noticeable when we make it out to Mars. Yes, yes, many, many minutes one-way round trip for the radio signals at that time. Should we go on to trivia? Okay, let's do that. Last week we asked you, what do all the feature names on Venus have in common?

How did we do? We got a lot of regulars, and we got a couple of folks we've never heard from before. In fact, our winner is someone that I think is new to us. But I'm going to mention first a past winner, Hannah Beck, who had the most detailed and accurate answer. Hannah, you didn't win this time, but we so much appreciated the full explanation, which goes like this. By international agreement, features on Venus have to be named after famous and notable women. There are a few rules. The woman must have been notable and in some way worthy of the honor. She cannot have been a military or political figure from the 19th or 20th centuries.

She cannot have been a person who was famous in any of our six major religions on our planet. She cannot have been a person who was famous only in one country. She must have been dead for at least three years. So that group clamoring for Barbra Streisand to have a Venusian feature named after her, you're just going to have to wait. But our winner was Mr. Robin Campbell. Robin Campbell of Edmonton, Alberta, who simply said, with one exception, actually there are more than that, a feature called Maxwell Montes, or the Maxwell Mountains,

all surface features on Venus are named after real or mythological females. And you were telling me it's actually more than just Maxwell. It is, it is. I over-exaggerated in the question, and I apologize. It's not all feature names on Venus that have naming after women in common, but almost all. So there are a couple others, such as Alpha and Beta Regio, Maxwell Montes, named after the famous physicist, and we also have a number of the valleys are named after the word for Venus in various languages. But other than that, all those others, I had to female. Well, Robin, we'll be getting this week's prize.

And you know what? I'm afraid I'm not sure whether it's a 3D Mars poster or a calendar. But we'll find out, Robin, and it'll be showing up in your mail soon. Or just an empty box with our heartfelt thanks. Which you can ship back to us with something else that's heartfelt. No, no, we'll get a prize out to you. How about this week's question? All right, continuing our lunar theme for the show,

what is the largest impact basin on the moon? That's simply stated, and if you know the answer, Bruce, how do they send it to us? Go to planetary.org, follow the links to Planetary Radio, and you too can enter our trivia contest for an exciting mystery prize. We are just about out of time, but I know there's at least one more interesting thing that, if it happens, someday is going to be This Week in Space history material. Yes, the Chinese are planning on launching their first human into space, which would make only the third space-faring country in terms of ability to send humans into space, and that is nominally targeted for sometime this week. And I know we wish them luck.

We do. We wish them luck and success. Well, there you have it, folks. That's What's Up for another week of Planetary Radio. Bruce, thanks again. Thank you. Remember, look up in the night sky and think about what it's like to go around the planet. Thank you and good night. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, joins us each week. Join us again next time for another new edition of Planetary Radio. I hope we'll have news of that first homegrown spaceflight by Chinese astronauts. How do you say bon voyage in Mandarin?

Have a great week, everyone.