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00:00the moon our closest celestial companion our indispensable dance partner through the cosmos
00:10lighting our night sky and gently tugging at our shores few have walked on her surface
00:18but her allure remains strong once again we are glancing her way with renewed interest
00:24and with a view to returning very soon
00:30you
01:00When I was a little girl and people were always asking me, what do you want to be when you
01:16grow up?
01:17And I used to always go, I want to work up there.
01:19As an engineer, you dream of a job like this where you get to follow in the footsteps of
01:25some of your childhood heroes and of course for me the Apollo missions, seeing these folks
01:32on TV step on the moon and work for NASA as an engineer, it's just a dream to be able
01:38to say, you know, I want to do that too and here I am.
01:47Only a dozen Americans have kicked the dirt on the lunar surface.
01:51It was a bold and dangerous engineering achievement driven by a political agenda.
02:00The Apollo program was important because it showed that we could leave our home planet
02:06and visit an object like the moon.
02:08However, what we want to do next is learn how to live and work off of our home planet on
02:15another planetary surface like the moon.
02:18By developing this capability, we'll be able to know how to go throughout the inner solar
02:26system which has many important destinations both for science understanding and also may
02:32have economic importance for not only our generation but for future generations.
02:43The Soviet Union and the US had peppered the lunar surface with soft and hard landing spacecraft.
02:49The Soviet's Luna 24 was the last of that program, returning soil samples that contain traces
02:54of water.
02:57Much of science and technology has advanced since the 1970s.
03:01The mechanism of world politics has evolved, new partnerships have formed, new players are
03:06looking skyward and, more recently, private enterprise has taken up the challenge.
03:16With the faintest of inklings that there may be usable water on the moon, a forensic focus
03:21has turned to the southern polar region.
03:25Scientific programs in the 90s refocused on the moon.
03:30Japan was the first to revive lunar research and only the third nation to achieve lunar orbit
03:35with Hiten on a dust collecting mission.
03:41The US followed with Clementine, a joint NASA military project.
03:45It completed a mapping survey of the lunar surface along with gravitational data and evidential
03:50proof of possible water ice hidden in a south polar crater in permanent darkness.
03:58Four years later, Lunar Prospector mapped lunar resources, gravity and magnetic fields.
04:04It was also impacted into the southern region of the surface to elicit more evidence of water
04:09ice hidden in the craters.
04:14Europe's contribution to this resurgence in lunar exploration began with the launch of
04:18SMART-1.
04:20This tiny, ion-propelled satellite catalogued key chemical elements on the surface.
04:26It also enhanced the theory that the moon was the result of a collision between Earth
04:30and a smaller celestial body called Theas some four and a half billion years ago.
04:41Japan's second probe was Selene, better known in Japan as Kaguya.
04:46It continued extensive observations of the lunar crust and also carried the first high definition
04:51cameras into lunar orbit, giving us a clearer picture of the rugged surface.
05:00Another proof of capability, this time by India.
05:03It also carried a NASA mineralogy mapper and an impact probe.
05:08It played a key role in the conformation of water hidden in the southern lunar pole.
05:14Eight months later, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or LRO.
05:19It has spent the last few years mapping and scanning the lunar world with sophisticated sensors and
05:25continues to return a wealth of data.
05:28The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is, as its namesake says, a reconnaissance mission to
05:32the moon.
05:33Our job is to take a suite of very powerful scientific instruments and make an atlas of
05:37the entire moon in some places in very great detail.
05:41Topography, mountain heights, mineralogy, temperatures, abundances of resources including
05:46potentially the intriguing possibility that there's water at the moon.
05:49We put all this together into a data set by flying low over the moon for a year.
05:55This is the data that the people designing the human systems, designing the systems, picking
05:59the sites, need to take us back to the moon.
06:03This robotic mission commenced operations in June 2009.
06:07It was hoped the suite of sensors would fulfill several scientific goals, not only for the moon,
06:13but as a framework for understanding planetary processes throughout the solar system.
06:18The LRO instrument suite is comprised of six instruments and one technology demonstrator.
06:25And they are geared towards providing us a variety of data sets ranging from a thermal
06:31map of the moon, global topography, and most importantly looking for resources like water
06:38ice on the moon.
06:39The entire suite should provide more of an atlas as opposed to a map so that we know where
06:45to go on the moon, where to have the safe landing sites, and where to put things like lunar
06:51outposts in the hopes of having human exploration in the near future.
06:59The data being returned from LRO and the other probes draws a clear image of the evolution
07:18of the lunar surface and why it is composed of exactly the same elements as the Earth.
07:23After coalescing from the Earth-Theas collision, the proto-moon cooled, then suffered several
07:34major collisions from orbital debris, which created many of the largest surface characteristics,
07:40including the mares.
07:46The evolution continued relentlessly over the millennia, drawing the familiar lunar vista.
07:58My name is Lynn Carter, I'm a research space scientist and I work with the Planetary Geodynamics
08:02Group here at Goddard.
08:03I study the geology of planetary surfaces, the Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus.
08:08There's a lot of things you can learn about the Earth by studying other planets.
08:11For example, on the Earth, we have a lot of erosive processes, you know, it rains, it washes
08:15parts of the surface away, we have plate tectonics, which recycles the crust.
08:19But on other planets, those processes don't necessarily occur.
08:22So, for example, when we look at the moon, we're seeing a surface that's much older.
08:26We can use impact cratering on the moon to sort of understand how many impacts happened,
08:30the size of the objects that were hitting each other in the early solar system.
08:34One of my favorite things is to use radar remote sensing.
08:36For example, on Mars, we can use radars to sound all the way to the bottom of Mars polar
08:40caps and see all this layering within the polar caps.
08:44And on the moon, we're using it to study impact cratering.
08:47Sometimes when an impact crater is formed, a huge sheet of melt is thrown out.
08:51This melted rock flows across the surface, but then over time, it's covered over by stuff
08:55from other impacts.
08:56But with the radar, it just blows right through all of that and you can see this beautiful image
09:00of the melt work coming out of the crater.
09:04Launched with LRO was LCROSS or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.
09:10It deployed some time later than LRO and had a finite mission.
09:15LCROSS and the rocket stage that delivered it were deliberately crashed into the craters
09:19of the South Pole, whilst LRO orbited above and observed the impacts.
09:25The debris and gases thrown up from the lunar surface were closely studied by LCROSS as
09:30it too descended to the surface.
09:34The missions found evidence that the lunar soil within these shadowy craters is rich in
09:39useful materials.
09:40The moon is chemically active and has a water cycle.
09:46Scientists also confirmed the water was in the form of mostly pure ice crystals which had
09:50not seen sunlight for billions of years.
09:56LRO has continued to operate in polar orbit, making observations of the South Pole, and with
10:02repeated flyovers, it has drawn up a detailed map of neutron densities in the region, revealing
10:07where hydrogen and thus water can be found within the lunar soil.
10:13The importance of this discovery cannot be overestimated.
10:17Having this resource in situ means independence from the cost and effort of bringing water from
10:23Earth to the moon.
10:29It can be used for creating rocket fuel, oxygen to breathe, water to consume and to irrigate
10:34crops, and used in other processes to manufacture building materials from the lunar soil.
10:40Launched in 2007, NASA's five Temis spacecraft have now successfully completed their two-year
10:56mission to determine the cause of geomagnetic substorms.
11:00Because they are continuing to work perfectly, NASA redirected the outermost two spacecraft to
11:05the moon.
11:07This new mission was called Artemis, and they studied the magnetospheric environment near
11:12the moon.
11:14They also observed the effects of surface electric fields and ions from the solar winds on the
11:19lunar surface, and determined the internal structure of the moon from variations in its
11:24magnetic field.
11:25Well, in a nutshell, what we're finding is that the polar craters are very unusual electrical environments.
11:33Well, the solar wind is actually a relatively tenuous gas that's emitted from the sun.
11:39But it's not a neutral gas like the gas in this room.
11:42It's actually a gas that's really, for the most part, free ions and free electrons.
11:47So, as you pass by, for example, a polar crater, the electrons will actually fill into the crater
11:54ahead of the ions.
11:55Now, as it turns out, as it does that, you create an electric field.
11:59It's called an ambipolar electric field, and that electric field then drives in the ions.
12:04These hidden troves of water, ice, and other volatiles in the polar craters may be protected
12:09by a dangerous electric charge of hundreds of volts.
12:25Three, two, one, zero, and liftoff of the Delta II with GRAIL.
12:33Journey to the center of the moon.
12:35GRAIL consisted of two probes called Ebb and Flow.
12:40Linked together in a single flight path, they studied the gravitational field of the moon,
12:45generating maps like this crustal thickness atlas.
12:48It reveals much about the interior of the moon and even has some surprises.
12:55Two years ago, we reported evidence that the moon is shrinking.
12:59Now we found evidence that the moon is actually being pulled apart, forming features called
13:05GRABIN.
13:07So the shrinking moon, it turns out, is not shrinking everywhere.
13:13Some places, the moon is actually expanding by a little bit.
13:18So finding these young GRABIN was a real surprise because we thought, well, all these lobate scarps
13:24are telling us the moon is shrinking.
13:26So what are these little, small GRABIN that are telling us the moon is pulling apart doing
13:33in this picture?
13:34How does this all fit together?
13:36All that's related to how the moon has evolved, how the moon has lost heat over its 4.5 billion
13:43year history.
13:45Most of the terrestrial planets, when they formed, were very hot.
13:48And they got so hot that they actually completely melted.
13:52When that happens, they will be in a general state of contraction because they're still hot
13:57on the inside and cooling down.
13:59And as they cool, they want to shrink.
14:01Only the outer part of the moon melted, forming what is called a magma ocean.
14:06And in that model, the balance of stresses or forces that are acting on the moon would allow
14:11us to form both these small lobate scarps that show contraction, as well as these small GRABIN
14:20that show the moon being pulled apart.
14:23One of the really, really exciting returns of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission
14:28is that we've seen this now growing evidence of very young geologic activity on the moon.
14:35The moon's crust is much thinner on the near side, 68 kilometers thick on average, and varies
14:40from less than a kilometer under Mari Crisium to 107 kilometers thick, just north of the
14:46crater Korolev on the lunar far side.
14:50The moon's mantle is only partially molten, and the moon's center of mass is offset by
14:55about 2 kilometers in the direction toward the Earth.
14:59This and other data quickly changed our understanding of the moon.
15:04To gather more evidence on the unusual electrical properties on the lunar surface and how it affects
15:09lunar dust, NASA sent LADEE, the lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer, to investigate.
15:16At higher altitudes, we saw very few dust particle impacts.
15:19But the lower we went with LADEE, the more we saw, and it's a very, very steep rise.
15:25So if you're operating with spacecraft very close to the surface of the moon, as you would
15:29with a robotic lander or a human lander, you might need to consider the fact that you've
15:35got more dust there in the way as you come in.
15:39This probe flew progressively lower and finally impacted on the surface.
15:44Ignition.
15:45Bravo.
15:46Main stage.
15:47Passer.
15:48This is Morpheus, a robotic self-guided lander.
15:54You tell it where to land, and it will do the rest, independently seeking the safest course
16:04and avoiding any rocky dangers.
16:09The ESA were also developing an autonomous lander to perform the same function.
16:15The lunar lander is a small but very challenging mission.
16:22The most important part of it is, of course, landing on the south pole of the moon, which
16:27requires innovative solutions concerning landing, avoidance, navigation, and in fact this is the
16:37mission which will bring about the new generation of navigation and guidance, sensor, algorithm,
16:44and software.
16:46But a fiscal year is a long time in space.
16:50NASA now have little interest in returning men to the moon.
16:54They are firmly focused on a Martian landscape.
16:57The Europeans have had budget cuts.
16:59The ESA lander now shelved for the time being.
17:02This leaves the door wide open for Russia and the younger players, China, India, and Japan,
17:09plus several private companies now developing the same technology to put first robots, then
17:15humans, on the moon.
17:17All this time, the Chinese National Space Administration, or CNSA, had launched two
17:23orbiter reconnaissance satellites, Chang'e 1 and 2.
17:27Then Chang'e 3 deposited a lunar rover on the surface.
17:31Their latest, Chang'e 5, made a return trip around the moon.
17:36They are firmly set on a permanent manned lunar base.
17:39I think the reason this has resonated with so many people, and all over the world, it's
17:45not just our country, is because everyone can look up in the sky and see the moon.
17:50And I think people, a lot of people remember the Apollo landings, the first man on the moon,
17:57and you can also look up at the sky, and I believe that people, it's very tangible to them that way.
18:03The moon, they can relate, and so they want to be a part of it.
18:07That's my theory on why people have just so connected.
18:14The moon is indeed a tantalizing prize.
18:29The Chinese have their lander and rover there now.
18:32Japan and India will be next.
18:34Next, South Korea has an interest along with Russia, Canada, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.
18:42Private enterprise has had a prod with the Google Lunar X prize.
18:46The $30 million prize pales beside the glory of being the first private company to land a robot on the moon,
18:53to explore at least 500 meters, and transmit high-definition images back to Earth.
19:00So far, there are four hot contenders.
19:03The Barcelona Moon team, a consortium of companies headed by Galactic Suite Design.
19:08Their interests lie in space technology and industry, with a strong focus on tourism.
19:14Penn State Lunar Lion team.
19:17Faculty and students are developing a spacecraft to land on the moon,
19:20then lift off again and relocate to fulfill the prize requirements.
19:25Moon Express is a group of space and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
19:29looking to mine the moon for its valuable resources like platinum,
19:33titanium and the rare isotope helium-3.
19:37Finally, Astrobotic Technology.
19:40A Pennsylvania-based company, with support from other companies including Alcoa and Caterpillar.
19:46They have already reserved a launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle.
19:53Getting to the moon is one thing, staying there is another.
19:58It was one thing to go for a handful of days at Apollo,
20:02and go when you knew that the sun was quiet, or you hoped the sun stayed quiet,
20:06and you took the risk, you calculated the risk of cancer and such,
20:10and you made a short mission.
20:12You're going to live there longer, you need to understand it well enough to go,
20:15here's what I need to do to protect myself.
20:18One of the things that we're looking for in the LRO mission is how the high radiation environment
20:25affects our ability to explore.
20:28So if we bring cameras or communication devices, you know,
20:33how will they be impacted by the cosmic radiation?
20:36We need to protect our equipment as well as ourselves.
20:40We want to be able to go back to the moon so that we can live there for long periods
20:45and work on the moon.
20:46So we need a mission that can help us find the best places to go
20:50and determine how to go back there safely.
20:53Access to solar power continuously, that may be the first and most important reason over,
20:59you know, the near term.
21:01And then the possibility of resources being there.
21:04Those may take much longer time before we're able to really exploit those,
21:09but the solar power is something we can exploit right away.
21:13Whether it's water, ice to have water,
21:15or potential minerals that we could use as raw materials to make into things that we would need.
21:22All the major players have designed and planned many varieties of lunar bases.
21:28NASA, ESA, and private contractors have concepts on the drawing board.
21:32As more information comes in from the lunar satellites on the environment, resources,
21:36and dangers of cosmic radiation, these plans evolve.
21:41One of the latest is to use 3D printing technology.
21:48With all the challenges and difficulties, many have made firm commitments to establishing bases within 10 to 15 years.
22:03Some for scientific research, others for commercialization and tourism.
22:15Some would choose not to send test pilots and scientists, but stewardesses and sommeliers.
22:21When we look back at what we did in LRO, and we look at what followed, I think we'll see a profound impact.
22:27We'll see us as really being the small first step where we have human beings permanently off this planet.
22:34Beginning to move out into the solar system, starting with the moon.
22:37As that pans out, I think we'll be a small piece of a profound development that when history looks back,
22:43and say, this time we went back to the moon, this time we stayed, and we moved on from there.
22:52As we continue to study the moon, our understanding of it improves,
22:56giving us new insights not only into how it has evolved over time,
23:00but also how other rocky planets in our solar system have come to look the way they do.
23:09With new missions, new instruments and new technologies, we will continue to improve our knowledge of the moon,
23:15and better understand the history of our solar system.
23:39We'll see you next time on the next day
23:43Monday!
23:44See you next time on Piane Dress
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