Robot missions will set the stage for a true lunar revival. Humans would make the trek again, not on behalf of just science, but also to modernize the old Moon into a vibrant economic powerhouse of a world.
Holding tight its secrets
"We are beneficiaries of that bold vision that was spelled out in 1962," said David Lawrence, a lunar scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and organizer of the meeting.
"While we are all grounded on the foundation of the Apollo program, in the past 10 years we have seen a renaissance in lunar science," Lawrence said. "With all the recent discoveries and work, excitement about the Moon and lunar science has been rekindled," he said.
The highly successful Clementine Defense Department survey mission (February-May 1994), and NASA's Lunar Prospector (January 1998-July 1999) both helped to show the Moon holds tight many secrets.
"All of the recent lunar science work has reinforced the idea that despite its apparent simplicity, the Moon is a very complicated planetary body about which there is much we still do not understand," Lawrence said.
Backyard answers
Hope is on full-throttle within the lunar science community that a NASA-backed robotic sample return mission to the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin may be flown before the decade is out. That mission got an enthusiastic thumbs-up on paper in early July by the National Research Council's Solar System Decadal Study - a first of its kind report to the space agency. The study set priorities for planetary exploration within the 2003-2013 time period.
"The Moon is a cornerstone for the understanding of what we know and can know about other terrestrial planetary bodies," said James Head, planetary geologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "A cornerstone is something on which you build the rest of the foundation, and in fact the rest of the edifice of understanding," he said.
"It's literally like going to our backyard to get answers to the questions we have," Head said.
Both Head and Carle Pieters, also a space geologist from Brown University, stressed that scientists remain woefully under-informed about the nature of impact craters. The Moon's a treasure trove of big-time celestial scars and gouges.
Big hole that went deep
South Pole-Aitken is the oldest and biggest basin on the Moon, Pieters said. "We want to return samples from a big hole that went deep," she added.
Such a major impact like South Pole-Aitken disrupts everything, including Earth and life, as we know it.
"It's extremely important to understand how terrestrial planets formed and evolve& how life evolved& to know what the impact environment was in the first couple hundred million years of evolution of the solid planets," Pieters said.
Using those samples to turn back the clock and determine how old the basin is - well, that's a critical bit of timekeeping.
Specimens from the basin should permit us to figure out whether or not there was a pulse of major impacts that took place at 4 billion years. Not only might we get a sneak peak at Earth's past, that data helps recognize how life may evolve on other solar system bodies -- or not -- depending on the character of the impact environment, Pieters said.
Sphere of influence
Looking at the Moon as a resource-rich sphere of influence is G. Jeffrey Taylor, a space scientist in the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawai'i in Honolulu.
"We can begin to do a certain level of resource exploration now, under the assumption that we're going to have thousands of people living and working on the Moon, and selling products to the Earth," Taylor said. "I'm not talking about a 10 or 20 person research facility, but really a thriving, economically viable colony on the Moon," he said.
Using current data, lunar prospecting can begin immediately, Taylor said.
A good collection of remote sensing data for the Moon exists. Furthermore, Taylor said, good sampling of the Moon is in hand, courtesy of the U.S. Apollo effort, and the former Soviet Union's series of robotic Moon sampling return craft, done under that country's Luna program.
Michael Duke, a research scientist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, said the Moon is a "stepping stone toward human expansion into the solar system."
"There are many scientific questions that require detailed exploration approaches at a scale that should be feasible with human exploration," Duke emphasized. He envisions the Moon as platform for astronomy and other potential scientific uses in which humans will be needed at some point to maintain and repair and construct facilities.
Duke said that conversion stations on the Moon would be capable of producing hydrogen and oxygen from lunar polar ice. "That can lead to a series of 'gas stations' on the lunar surface, where the power and propulsion systems of surface exploration vehicles can be repeatedly replenished," he said.
NExT Points
"The Moon is a history book," said Doug Cooke, Manager of the Advanced Development Office at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Cooke explained that NASA has a large part of its workforce born after the space agency succeeded in sending humans to the Moon. "It's a paragraph in a history book to them," he said.
That being the case, NASA experience in running human space travel missions is limited, and needs to be regained, Cooke said.
A new approach for exploration beyond low Earth orbit has been fleshed out.
Through the work of the NASA Exploration Team (NExT), a staging area at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point, L1, is now being advocated.
This "Gateway location" at L1 - capable of being occupied from time to time by human crews -- is a possible way to return to the Moon, Cooke said. Also, this Gateway can be used to build-up, repair and service super-observatories that are positioned at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point, L2.
Ecological niche
Can the lunar science community rally itself to get back into Moon exploration?
The question warrants a "wait and see" from Apollo 17 moonwalker, Harrison Schmitt.
"We'll have to see whether a community as diverse as the lunar science community -- compared to astronomy and others -- can really pull itself together to come up with a coherent strategy that they believe in as well as argue for," Schmitt told SPACE.com .
"Things like this have been tried before. Maybe this is the time it's going to work," Schmitt said.
Schmitt said that a key factor is beefing up funds to support the next generation of scientists that will carry on and take their turn in battling for lunar science. "It's unfortunate that we haven't fully realized or comprehended that the Moon is not only a very, very accessible scientific resource, it's a very accessible economic resource," he explained.
"The Moon is a station, a space station, and a very stable one," the Apollo 17 astronaut said. "It is a place where human beings, for the first time in the history of the species, can indeed establish themselves independent of their planet of origin. The species is trying to expand the ecological niche in which they can survive."
"The Moon is the first place outside the Earth where we can do that. Mars is obviously the second place. The Moon is a clear stepping stone to Mars. Probably, you'll never get to Mars unless you establish yourself on the Moon first. It pays the basic fundamental capital costs of establishing the human species in space. Going to Mars is more of a marginal cost& once you are well established on the Moon," Schmitt concluded.
advertisement
