With the present interests in what is going on at our Moon and about to happen with the Chang'e 3 mission, you might wonder if there is any possibility to put humans there again. If you just stay for three days you can bring your own box lunches. If you really want to think about staying for any extended time you may want to grow some fresh vegetables.
Easier said than done. Down here on Earth, just throw some soil in a pot, some seeds, add some water, air, and light. Maybe control the temperature range. [brrr, it has been cold this last week and the pepper plant leaves have curled up.]
Hmm, at the lunar environment the composition of soil is different than what I might get here for potting soil. The more we learn about what is available on the Moon, the better we will be able to prepare our indoor hot house. The less we have to bring up to the Moon the better.
Both the Chang'e 3 lander and rover will help analyze soil samples and a later mission plans to return some lunar soil to Earth.
Since we will need to dig in to be protected from solar radiation it will be good to know what is under the lunar soil. The Chang'e Jade Rabbit rover has a ground penetrating radar that should be useful.
- LRK -
Check out the references to the Wikipedia articles that follow. - LRK -
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Chang'e 3 (Chinese: 嫦娥三号; pinyin: Chán
The spacecraft is named after Chang'e, the goddess of the Moon in Chinese mythology, and is a follow-up to the Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2 lunar orbiters. The lunar rover is called Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, a name selected in an online poll that comes from a Chinese myth about a white rabbit that lives on the Moon as a companion of the moon goddess Chang'e.[11] It achieved lunar orbit on 6 December 2013 (Beijing time).[12]
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This article or section documents a current or recent spaceflight. Details may change as the mission progresses.
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A look at what lunar soil is.
- LRK -
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Lunar soil is the fine fraction of the regolith found on the surface of the Moon. Its properties can differ significantly from those of terrestrial soil. The physical properties of lunar soil are primarily the result of mechanical disintegration of basaltic and anorthositic rock, caused by continuous meteoric impact and bombardment by interstellar charged atomic particles over billions of years. The process is largely one of mechanical weathering in which the particles are ground to finer and finer size over time. This situation contrasts fundamentally to terrestrial soil formation, mediated by the presence of molecular oxygen (O2), humidity, atmospheric wind, and a robust array of contributing biological processes. Some have argued that the term "soil" is not correct in reference to the Moon because on the Earth, soil is defined as havingorganic content, whereas the Moon has none. However, standard usage among lunar scientists is to ignore that distinction.
The term lunar soil is often used interchangeably with "lunar regolith" but typically refers to only the finer fraction of regolith, that which is composed of grains one cm in diameter or less.[1] Lunar dust generally connotes even finer materials than lunar soil. There is no official definition of what size fraction constitutes "dust", some place the cutoff at less than 50 micrometres in diameter, others at less than 10.
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Not all of the Moon's surface is pulverized to dust and so we will need to be able to adapt to varying terrain.
- LRK -
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Regolith is a layer of loose, heterogeneous material covering solid rock. It includes dust, soil, broken rock, and other related materials and is present on Earth, the Moon, Mars, some asteroids, and other terrestrial planets and moons.
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Moon
Regolith covers almost the entire lunar surface, bedrock
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The more real lunar soil samples we have the better lunar soil simulant that can be created. These are needed when you start thinking about using lunar materials for on site construction. I wonder if any of the below is still available.
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Engineering, Construction, and Operations in Space IVAmerican Society of Civil Engineers, pp. 857-866, 1994
JSC-1: A NEW LUNAR SOIL SIMULANT
David S. McKay, James L. Carter, Walter W. Boles,
Carlton C. Allen, and Judith H. Allton
A new lunar soil simulant, JSC-1, has been developed and characterized under the auspices of the NASA Johnson Space Center. This simulant was produced in large quantities to satisfy the requirements of a variety of scientific and engineering investigations. JSC-1 is derived from volcanic ash of basaltic composition, which has been ground, sized, and placed into storage. The simulant's chemical composition, mineralogy, particle size distribution, specific gravity, angle of internal friction, and cohesion have been characterized and fall within the ranges of lunar mare soil samples. JSC-1 is available for only the cost of shipping.
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Well it looks like some other more recent sources have been made.
And CAS-1 Lunar Soil Simulant from China..
Thanks for looking up with me.
- LRK -
The Moon could be a "beautiful" source of minerals and energy, a top Chinese scientist has told the BBC.
Exotic materials including helium-3 and the potential for solar power could prove invaluable for humankind, he says.
The comments come from Prof Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration.
His first interview with the foreign media provides insights into China's usually secretive space programme.
Prof Ouyang was speaking ahead of the first Chinese attempt to land an unmanned spacecraft on the lunar surface.
The Chang'e 3 lander is due to launch imminently, perhaps as soon as Sunday evening, UK time.
It will be the first to make a soft touchdown on the Moon since an unmanned Russian mission in 1976
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- LRK -
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Guessing the Chang’e-3 trajectory [Where is Chang'e-3 now]BlogSpot: http://
WordPress: http://lrkellogg.
RSS link: http://
Newsletter: https://mailman1.
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Our Chinese colleagues launched a lander to the Moon on December first, but unfortunately they have chosen not to publicly share where their spacecraft is. A few days ago there were several TLEs in Spacetrack associated with the Chang’e 3 launch, all of which didn’t appear to be associated with it at first glance (wrong plane, etc.) . So, given we don’t have any real ephemeris available, let’s see if we can create a reasonable guess on our own with a bit of Astrodynamics detective work.
First, let’s start off with some information we do know from their live broadcast.
We know the launch time: 1 Dec 2013 17:30 UTC.
We know the launch site is the LC2 Launch Complex at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center (XSLC). I have 28.2455 deg N Latitude, and 102.027 E Longitude for that site.
Next question is, what direction do they launch, and to what altitude?
Robert Christy’s excellent site Zarya.info provides us with a decent first guess here:
Robert did a lot of our work for us by nailing the separation events, and approximate latitude and longitude positions of events based on the video stream. It may seem rough to try to calculate a trajectory from this information, but actually it tells us quite a bit. We know the launch site, and we know the approximate perigee altitude of the transfer trajectory (~210 km) . We also have a pretty good idea of the TLI time: 6 Dec 2013 09:30 UTC from a tweet by Robert Christie (@Zarya_Info) and we know the landing site from the same source. So let’s make a few simplifications:
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Why China is fixated on the Moon
David Shukman
29 November 2013 Last updated at 09:38 ET
Exotic materials including helium-3 and the potential for solar power could prove invaluable for humankind, he says.
The comments come from Prof Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration.
His first interview with the foreign media provides insights into China's usually secretive space programme.
Prof Ouyang was speaking ahead of the first Chinese attempt to land an unmanned spacecraft on the lunar surface.
The Chang'e 3 lander is due to launch imminently, perhaps as soon as Sunday evening, UK time.
It will be the first to make a soft touchdown on the Moon since an unmanned Russian mission in 1976
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Space weathering is a blanket term used for a number of processes that act on any body exposed to the harsh space environment. Airless bodies (including the Moon, Mercury, the asteroids, comets, and some of the moons of other planets) incur many weathering processes:
- collisions of galactic cosmic rays and solar cosmic rays,
- irradiation, implantation, and sputtering from solar wind particles, and
- bombardment by different sizes of meteorites and micrometeori
tes.
Space weathering is important because these processes affect the physical and optical properties of the surface of many planetary bodies. Therefore, it is critical to understand the effects of space weathering in order to properly interpret remotely sensed data.
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -
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