Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Turning Moondust Into Air and Water

Episode Date: May 5, 2008

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Making your air and water out of moon dust, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Face it, you're not going to live on the moon or Mars or anywhere else if you can't locally manufacture the stuff you need to breathe and drink. That turns out to be really hard to do. Gerald Sanders leads the In-Situ Resource Utilization

or ISRU project for NASA. We'll talk with him about the progress that is being made by many engineers and scientists. Bill Nye the Science Guy has an invitation to share with you while Emily Lakdawalla ponders the dark side of the moon, which isn't really dark, of course, but that's another story. And Bruce Betts meets his match on today's What's Up. Could this be another opportunity to win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt? Yes, it could be, if you can sing. We've got the space headlines at Planetary.org, including a chance

to send your name to the moon on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Also, a great new status report on Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rovers. Here's Bill Nye. Bill Nye, the Planetary planetary guy here talking to you about another town hall meeting. We want your opinions about what we should be doing next to explore space. So this is going to take place on Wednesday, May 7th at Georgia Tech, the Georgia Institute of Technology at the College of Management building. It's 800 West Peachtree Street Northwest in Atlanta. It's free. It'll be fun. We start at six in the evening and we go for

a couple of hours. And we did this a few weeks ago in Boston and it was really, it's just fantastic. It was so much fun and it was fascinating. People from all walks of life, boys and girls, men and women, if I may, kids of all ages, had opinions about what we should be doing in space. And everyone had an opinion about the Vision for Space Exploration, the VSE. So we want to hear from you. You know, as we always say, if you want to do something about space, join the Planetary Society. Well, the Planetary Society wants to hear what you want us to do about space. Come on down, Georgia Tech, Wednesday, May 7th, 6 p.m. It's going to be fun. Let's explore space together.

I got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. The moon is a harsh mistress. Too bad it isn't made of green cheese. That might be a lot easier to turn into stuff you can breathe and drink. Nevertheless, scientists and engineers are learning how to turn lunar regolith into the basic commodities that colonists will need to survive. Gerald Sanders manages the NASA ISRU project. I called him at his Johnson Space Center office in Houston, Texas.

The telephone audio quality gets better after a couple of minutes. Jerry, thanks very much for taking a few minutes out of your day to talk to us on Planetary Radio. You're welcome. Tell me if this is a fair statement, that we don't need to do in-situ resource utilization to return to the moon. But if we're going to stay there for any length of time or anywhere else in the solar system, it's probably a really good idea. Yeah, I think that's a very fair statement. Obviously, the Apollo program, we were able to send two astronauts to the moon for several days without having to live off the land. days without having to live off the land. However, I think it becomes, even with a very good life support system, you still need to bring oxygen and water from Earth. So living off the land,

even just for the crew, would be extremely beneficial over extended periods of time. I personally would like to see it used for more than that, such as propulsion to get back to Earth, for example, would be a tremendous savings in terms of mass and reuse of hardware. Well, I know that's been proposed for Mars for some time, that we could make the fuel for the return trip. That is correct. There's been several studies done on Mars in particular. What's funny is that there's actually a lot of commonality between lunar in situ resource utilization and possible Mars in situ resource utilization. The possible widespread availability of water on Mars raises the possibility that besides converting the Mars atmosphere carbon dioxide into oxygen and fuel, the water there could be a tremendous benefit. The processes that we're looking at for digging up lunar regoliths and extracting the oxygen may be extremely similar to the digging up of Mars soil

and heating it up to drive off water that might be present near the surface. So this is a good example, I suppose, then, of why returning to the Moon is going to eventually help us to establish a presence on Mars? Definitely. A lot of what we're doing in the ISRU activities are with the idea of what would we do on Mars downstream. Water processing, for example, is one. On Mars, we want to convert carbon dioxide into basically methane and water. Similar processes can be used for lunar ISRU in terms of using what's called the carbothermal method, where we

actually use methane to break down lunar regolith, and then we have to regenerate that methane with a similar process to what we would use on Mars. So here again, even the atmospheric portion of Mars ISRU can be very similar to something that we would do on the moon. Obviously, all of this, very useful, very good idea, but much easier said than done. Yes. The lunar missions were maximum of three days. To live off the land, you have to dig up material and process it for months, if not years, to get any worthwhile products. That's extremely challenging. The lunar regolith is highly abrasive, and just dealing with that kind of a process for long periods of time in a vacuum. We have to pour this material through valves and close those valves hundreds if not thousands of times.

Trying to have that stay leak-tight for years is definitely a challenge. We are turning to terrestrial industries that deal with handling powders and materials like that as a starting point. I have some personal experience with lunar regolith because we covered on this show the lunar regolith challenge, one of the centennial challenges last year here in California. It is kind of nasty stuff, even though it's full of things we can use. Yeah, and even the simulants that were used in that challenge that have been created through this project that I'm leading are fairly benign in comparison to the lunar regulates. Sadly enough, we are working on next generation simulants that are more representative of

both the materials that you might find at the lunar poles, as well as the shape of the particles. The Kennedy Space Center did a very simple test not too long ago where they poured that material, that simulant, through a glass funnel that was, I think, about a half-inch diameter, and it flowed very nicely. They had a vial of actual Apollo lunar material, and when they poured it into that same glass vial, it wouldn't go through. And we believe it's a combination of the static charge that was on the glass material, as well as the shape of real lunar material, makes it that much more difficult to flow. But progress is being made in processing

this stuff. Your office heads that. But you've got agencies all over the United States and at least one in Canada who are making progress. Yes, I'm very pleased by that. ISRU for years has been working at a laboratory level. They've shown the basic feasibility, but nobody has had up to this point put together an end-to-end process at a scale relevant to a human mission. And we're in the process of doing that now to such an extent that we hope to have field demonstrations of this hardware in November of this year, where we will be digging up this lunar simulant, processing it in reactors, creating water and electrolyzing that water at a rate very similar to what we would want to do on the moon. Now, will this be on this, well, it's a rover, I guess, but the project

or the rover itself is known as Resolve? We actually have two different programs. I think the material that you're referring to, Resolve, is a flight demonstration prototype that we built in conjunction with NORCAT, which is a Canadian mining company, which would drill down into the lunar surface a meter deep, pull out this meter core, and then process it in chunks. And the purpose of this demonstration or resolve, which we love to use acronyms, deals with the regolith and environmental science and oxygen and volatile lunar extraction, is a precursor that could be used to go into the

permanently shadowed craters of the moon where we think water might be. And so the idea was we would go into the permanently shadowed crater, drill down a meter deep, because that's what the lunar prospector instrument could measure down to, pull up this material, and then heat it up and extract any water ice that was there. And then at the same time, we would then take that material, heat it up, and extract oxygen from it. And so this was a subscale demonstration that we're building that would go on this mobile platform Carnegie Mellon University is building. And we're going to demonstrate the whole process on the Scarab Rover again this November. That'll be fun. I would love to be there, but we'll have to watch for the videos of that.

And, of course, we all know that one of the primary job requirements working for NASA is to come up with clever acronyms. Yes. That's Gerald Sanders of NASA's In-Situ Resource Utilization Project. We'll dig up some more moon dirt in a minute when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration.

The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio,

or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week with NASA's ISRU manager, Gerald Sanders.

ISRU, that's In-Situ Resource Utilization, which simply means turning lemons into lemonade, or more accurately, turning the surface of the moon into the oxygen and water that you'll need to survive if you want to live there for any substantial length of time. Even digging down a few feet to where the good stuff is turns out to be very, very difficult. One might think that designing a drill to go down a meter or so into the lunar surface might be one of the easier challenges that you've taken on, but it's really not when you consider, I guess,

what could happen if it hits a layer of ice up there in that extreme cold. Yeah, I'm definitely not a miner or drilling expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I've had to learn very quickly what is needed. And on Earth, we have the luxury of changing drill bits, for example, when you go through different media, whether it's something coarse or fine like sand to something hard like a basaltic rock. Ice itself, at the temperatures we're talking about, can get as hard as concrete, depending on how much ice or water might be there. So we have to design a drill that can operate at extremely low temperatures

in an extremely abrasive environment, and then can have any material characteristics between rough sand to extremely hard concrete or sandstone. And so that combination of factors has been very difficult. And then at the same time, trying to get this material to flow into the pipe so that we can pull out a whole meter core has been extremely challenging. But we've made tremendous progress. Have you reached a point in this progress where you, I mean, in spite of daunting engineering challenges that remain, where you have the feeling that, let's say, in the 2020s, we might be able to have a little pilot plant next to a lunar base that provides the oxygen and water needed by the inhabitants

of that base. Oh, definitely. Not only this project, but the other project that we're working on is what's called Optima for outpost precursor. I can't remember off the top of my head,,000 kilograms of oxygen per year. This hardware will also be demonstrated this November. And should both of these projects be successful, it's now then a matter of refining and making those processes better than just proving that it can be done. Definitely, based on the experience that we hope to get later this year, it will be a refining and running longer and working on issues like the abrasion and the life versus just the basic feasibility. I know a big part of your job is not just making these technologies work, but figuring out how they will integrate into the whole Moon, Mars, and Beyond program, specifically the Constellation program.

Can you talk about that? I'd love to hear how this is fitting in with our plans to return to the Moon. Well, that's been the biggest challenge so far. On the one hand, we want to incorporate as many new ideas and technologies as possible into the lunar program, like ISRU. At the same time, we're putting together notional architectures and designs that have to be based on things that we've experienced and flown already before. So how do you incorporate into an architecture something that up to this point has never been demonstrated. And so we've taken the approach where we're not baselining or having the ability to make oxygen on the moon in what's called the critical path, such that we can't go to the moon without having this capability. But at the same time, we have to come up with a way that should we prove

this to work, we can incorporate it into the architecture in a seamless fashion. We're at the moment looking at could we fly, say, an ISRU oxygen plant early on in the lunar mission such that if it works, we could eliminate the need for bringing oxygen or water from the Earth for subsequent human missions and instead start adding extra science payload or solar arrays or whatever. If it doesn't work in one of these earlier missions, then you still have that fallback of planning on bringing tanks of oxygen and water until you can finally make this work. So this kind of stepwise approach, I think, is how we're going to try and add these new technologies into the lunar program. How do you like basically being a pioneer who may be enabling the real pioneers of the future to move humanity out across the solar system?

Well, I feel lucky and blessed to be in the job that I'm in. We have a highly motivated workforce, both inside of NASA as well as industry and academia. We're trying something new. It's never been done. It's been shown to be possible in a laboratory, but as everyone knows, once you actually try to put something together and make it run for a period of time, that's when the real challenges come along. And so while we're running towards these demonstrations in November, there's tremendous excitement about the possibility of showing that this can finally be done. about the possibility of showing that this can finally be done. Once that happens, then I think the attention will be gained such that it will almost be like a,

you know, duh, why didn't we think about this before? Versus, you know, view graphs of how wonderful this could be. It is extremely exciting. Jerry, maybe we should check back with you toward the end of the year after that November demonstration. Best of luck with all of these new technologies that you are developing for our further exploration and development of space. Thanks. I would look forward to talking with you again. Jerry Sanders manages the ISRU, the In-Situ Resource Utilization Project for NASA. He's at the Johnson Space Center outside of Houston. We'll be right back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up after we check in with Emily.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, why is the near side of the moon so different from the far side? People have been gazing at the moon since before we were human, and we're accustomed to its blotchy face. So it was a real shock in 1959 when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 showed us the far side of the moon for the first time. We now know that the dark splotches that make up the maria on the near side of the moon are broad stretches of a dark volcanic rock known as basalt. The far side has almost no maria, so it doesn't seem to have experienced the same kind of volcanic activity. We still don't know why the two sides are so different. One thing we do know is that the moon was once almost completely molten. As the first crystals of rock

started solidifying from the global magma ocean, a white mineral called plagioclase feldspar floated to the surface, making the bright rocks that form the lunar highlands today. One possibility is that currents that swirled in the global magma ocean may have caused rock bergs of feldspar to clump together into one hemispheric continent that just happened to drift to the lunar far side, making the crust there especially thick and preventing basaltic lava from flowing out to the surface to make maria. If the nearside-farside dichotomy is just a coincidence, then you'd expect that the thickest part of the lunar crust wouldn't exactly match

the alignment of the near side and far side of the moon. In fact, that's exactly what we see. The hemisphere with the thickest crust is offset from the Earth-moon axis by 23 degrees. Still, coincidence isn't a very satisfying explanation, so this is one question that all the new spacecraft launching to the moon in this decade are seeking to answer. 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 on Planetary Radio. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's sitting across from me. He's taking a last sip of water, preparing himself for this great event. And now you can hit us with what's up in the night sky. Hey, there's cool stuff up in the night sky. We've got Mercury making a lovely apparition in the evening sky. Check that out.

Check it out soon. It is in the west shortly after sunset. It's the bright star-like object over there. Low down, so you need a good view to the west, but it'll be that way for a couple weeks. Mercury, always tough spots. Good to do it when you have a chance. If you pick up this show really quickly after it goes online uh on the tuesday the 6th the crescent moon should be right right close to it they'd have to be really quick hey the devoted fans yeah whenever you're getting this whenever

you're out in the early evening or mid-evening you can check out mars mars Mars up high in the west, looking kind of reddish. It's actually near Castor and Pollux, the Gemini twins, and actually similar in color to Pollux, which it's closest to. So they kind of line up, and Mars is the one furthest on the left. The left? I love those technical terms. Go to Pollux and turn left and you'll see Mars. Straight on toward morning.

Yeah, and they'll actually vary in position quite a bit from over a few days period. So you can watch Mars move relative to the sky. Wandering star. Exactly, which is, of course, planet in Greek, as we all know. Thank you. And if you go farther up in the sky, kind of over towards the east in the evening sky, you will see Saturn. And Saturn hanging out very close to Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. But Saturn's actually brighter and kind of yellowish. And over the coming weeks,

watch for Mars and Saturn to get closer and closer in the night sky. And also when you've got three planets, if you're out there for Mercury, I always think it's fun. Check out that ecliptic plane. If you go for Mercury, you go up, draw a line up to Mars over to Saturn. They kind of line up onto something, I hope. On to, you know what I want to go on to? What? Random Space Fact!

want to. What? Random Space Fact! Now, I'm glad you did such a nice performance there. I felt a lot of pressure. Because you actually do have competition now. Listener Ted Judah decided that he wanted to take a shot at Random Space Fact. So let us play you a little bit of what Ted sent us. Hello, Bruce Betts. I just wanted to give you some ideas for your voice tones on Random Space Facts. I seem to feel like I want more when I hear those, so feel free to use them. You may recognize this one. Random Space Fact. If that's too pseudoscientific, you could go with random space fact. And by the way, I'm sick at home and I have lots of time on my hand today. So you have some real competition. I do. I prefer to look at it as I've inspired.

I love the Close Encounters version myself. We're probably in violation of Spielberg copyright or something, but just the same. I love it. Can we maybe get some more people to try this? You know, if people do this and we think they're specifically groovy, we will play them on air. If we play it on air, then we'll give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Sounds fair. Sounds fair. Send us MP3 files, please.

You can, if they should be small enough, just attach them to your note to planetaryradio at planetary.org. And you'll hear that address again, I bet you, in a couple of minutes. Yes, they will. And you know what? I think it would be nice of me to actually give people a random space fact. Oh, what the heck. I may have done part of this before, but I'm going to update it. We've got the SNCC meteorites,

SNCC being Mars meteorites named after the three major classes, Shurgatites, Noctlites, and the one I can never pronounce right, Csignites. And they are named after these cities, as meteorites are. They're named after the cities where the these

first mars meteorites in each class were found uh and there are now 34 wow mars meteorites in earth's mars meteorite collection we might get back to that later in the show i like those themes once in a while all right let's go on to a trivia contest. At the time of the beginning of the space age, so launch of Sputnik, what was the largest telescope in the world? And silly me, I'm sorry, I forgot to say what I was thinking, and I could swear I had said, I think Matt cut it out when he edited it, which was largest optical telescope. But since we didn't say, we threw everyone into the hopper

who gave us the largest optical or radio telescope at that time. How did we do? We got lots of both. Some people were literalists and sent us. Biggest telescope in the world at that time, 1957. In fact, it apparently went online the summer before Sputnik, the summer of 1957, went online the summer before Sputnik, the summer of 1957, was the Lovell Telescope, as it's now called, at Jodrell Bank Observatory, 250 feet across, 76 meters, a radio telescope.

And we had people point out, like Ian, Ian Scales, who probably isn't too far away from there, saying that it's been cut out of the budget, And so there's a fight to keep it going. But another one that's still going very strong, as you know, the 200-inch Hale telescope at Mount Palomar in California, as submitted by Brett Pataloni, who is from Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and won like six months ago. And so, Brett, you get a second T-shirt out of this. And the reason I say you should know this is you've used that instrument, haven't you? I have used that bad boy, 200-inch, in working with some others when I was at Caltech,

piggybacking on their time trying to observe moons of planets. Yeah, it is an impressive beast. 200 inches of pure astronomical goodness. It's cool. And they've actually found very clever ways even in the age of bigger telescopes to still be doing really cutting edge stuff

using very clever optics and other things. So still going 50 years later or more. You got to get me in there someday. You have to use your connections and get me in there. Cause all I've ever seen are photos. Yeah. Well,

it's actually just a cardboard cutout. It's not real. Let's go on. Let's return to the SNICs, the SNC meteorites. Tell me the countries where those three meteorites fell that the snakes are named after. So the Shurgatites, the Nocklites, the Chasignites. What three countries did those meteorites fall in?

And go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to get us your entry. And you need to get it to us by the 12th of May, May 12, 2008, 2 p.m. Pacific time. We're done. We're late. We're late. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the lids to things in life that keep things from spilling. You know, those lids. The lids?

As opposed to the lids that don't keep things from spilling, which are just annoying. Thank you, and good night. Okay, well, that's consumer reporter Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Hey, bottoms up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week. Thank you.