|Space |Science |Center: Forward This To An Awesome Friend

Getting my moon photos ready. Freezing my eyepiece off lol Might need to wait a month or 2 before getting a DSLR   @Antiproton_com 13h twitter.com The cosmonaut exhibition @sciencemuseum is a design delight. #cosmonaut #design #science #space #russia #ussr   @_jonathanmckee 15h twitter.com Gassendi Crater   @Betelgeuse10 18h twitter.com The moon on Nov 22, 2015. Canon 7D 200mm, cropped.   @Abana09 18h twitter.com The Space-Sites Daily is out! paper.li/icelefant/1306… Stories via @ananddamanica @orbitalblue @soyrobo   @icelefant 5h paper.li The icelefant Daily is out! paper.li/icelefant?edit… Stories via @UniphiSpaceAge @GTCtelescope @stephenodonnell   @icelefant 20h paper.li

back to Moon |Lunar X Prize

back to Moon As-it-happens update ⋅ December 18, 2014
Tech Times Google extends Lunar X Prize deadline to 2016 it is to develop a rover, send it to the moon, drive it 1,640 feet and then transmit "HDTV Mooncasts" back to Earth (whew). So, it's now extended the ...

Faszination Moon |NASA

#Moon #Apollo11 

Hier die allerersten Foto, das je ein Mensch auf dem Mond gemacht hat:
Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin direkt beim Flagge aufstellen!

Quelle:

Apollo 11 Image Library

Figure Captions Copyright © 1995-2009 by Eric M. Jones and Ken Glover.
All rights reserved.
HTML Design by Brian W. Lawrence.
Last revised 31 January 2014.

conjunction of the Moon|Venus

on |Space |Science |Center's RebelMouse and thought you'd like it!
There's a very close conjunction of the Moon Venus 25. Feb. 2014

#astronomy #Moonwatch

Quelle: TwitterSite

   

Low Reflectance Deposits... |LROC

Low Reflectance Deposits on the Lassell Massif

Low reflectance deposits are seen along the margins of Lassell G and Lassell K (14.918°S; 351.065°E). NAC frame M1116585481R, illumination is overhead, north is up, image is ~1.8 km wide 

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

#NASA #GSFC #LROC #Mission

the Gruithuisen Domes |LROC

#LROC #Moon #NASA

An oblique view of the northern portion of the Gruithuisen Gamma volcanic dome. LROC NAC M1106087898LR, north is to the right 

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Continue reading "New Views of the Gruithuisen Domes"

Schiaparelli E |Moon

#LROC #Moon #NASA

A recent impact in Oceanus Procellarum produced a spectacular, circular melt pond (27.126°N; 62.068°W).
NAC frame M176684041L, illumination is from the east, north is up, image is ~1.8 km wide 


[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Quelle:
LROC |Continue reading "Schiaparelli E"

Meanders in Posidonius |LROC

Small portion of a S-shaped meandering rille on the floor of Posidonius Crater (31.93°N, 29.85°E, 100 km diameter) - a floor-fractured crater. The curves in the rille are very tight. 

LROC NAC M1098658474R
[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Continue reading "Meanders in Posidonius"

Parting Moon Shots |GRAIL

Parting Moon Shots from NASA's GRAIL Mission:







Three days prior to its planned impact on a lunar mountain, mission controllers activated the camera aboard one of NASA's GRAIL twins to take some final photos from lunar orbit.

#NASA #GRAIL #Moon #Video

Picard Crater |LROC Moon

Picard crater, at 14.55° N, 54.74° E, exposes a chemically distinct underlying basalt layer in Mare Crisium.

Cracks in a terrace on Picard crater's wall indicate the terrace was flooded with impact melt. The cracks probably formed during cooling of the impact melt as it solidified. LROC NAC M1107917713RE, image width is ~1300 m.

Quelle:
[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University]

Continue reading "Picard Crater Impact Melt"

#Moon #Expedition #travelflight Private sector human expeditions to the Moon!

#Moon #Expedition #travelflight

Private sector human expeditions to the Moon are now feasible, primarily using existing space systems or those in development. The Golden Spike Company is working to implement and operate a human space transportation system at commercially successful price points. Our company is comprised of veteran space program executives, managers, engineers and entrepreneurs   focused on generating a sustainable human lunar exploration business that generates profits through multiple high value revenue streams.

Quelle: goldenspikecompany.com

Apollo 17 Moonwalk |Photos

First Apollo 17 Moonwalk:

Forty years ago today on Dec. 11, 1972, astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, commander, makes a short checkout of the lunar rover during the early part of the first Apollo 17 extravehicular activity at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. This view of the "stripped down" rover is prior to loading up. Equipment later loaded onto the rover included the ground-controlled television assembly, the lunar communications relay unit, hi-gain antenna, low-gain antenna, aft tool pallet, lunar tools and scientific gear.This photograph was taken by scientist-astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, lunar module pilot. 

The mountain in the right background is the east end of South Massif. While astronauts Cernan and Schmitt descended in the Lunar Module "Challenger" to explore the moon, astronaut Ronald E. Evans, command module pilot, remained with the Command and Service Modules "America" in lunar orbit.

Apollo 17: 40 Years Later

Image Credit: NASA

wat is a Space Cows?

Slaying Sacred Space Cows:

by dennis ray wingo

I spend a fair amount of time discussing space development with people, in presentations,  blogs, and in personal conversations.  Most people who know me know that one of my prime foci is off planet industrialization, principally beginning with orbital space and then the Moon.  One of the most baffling and tragic responses that I get in this realm is the complete dismissal of the entire concept.  The back and forth in someone else’s blog thread is never satisfying because you cannot develop more than a short stream of thought and when the other person/persons are simply dismissive, no real progress is made.  Thus in this missive I am going to go into some of my basic thoughts regarding lunar industrialization and see if we can get beyond these, in my opinion, misunderstandings regarding how hard it is.

Background

As is my way in developing these ideas lets begin with how things are done here on the Earth and then see how they might develop on the Moon.  I always look at history as a guide.  I grew up near Birmingham Alabama, then called “The Pittsburg of the South”.  Some of my earliest memories are of riding in a car by the big steel mills in Ensley, Fairfield, and downtown (Sloss furnaces) Alabama.

These places always fascinated me as you could see the hot steel ingots being stamped, rolled, and worked from the car.  At Sloss you could see the hot steel being poured from the ladles into molds.  Many of my friends that I grew up with now work at steel mills like Fairfield, ACIPCO, O’Neal Steel, and others.  While I have not worked at any of these myself, I know a pretty good bit about them and have used their products in hardware that we have built, such as our 22,500 lb steel solar/wind trailers.  Figure 1 is a picture of the frame of our solar/wind trailer under construction:

Figure 1: The GSW-7000 Solar/Wind Trailer Frame Under Construction, Centreville Maryland, 2011

The trailer under construction in the picture above is made from standard A-36 steel.  The frame parts are made from tube, “c” channel, flat plate, and square tubes.  All of these parts are welded together using very simple frames, c clamps, and other devices to hold the pieces together while they are welded.  This principle is pretty much how most heavy equipment is built, with the larger production lines being more automated.  The pieces here came from a steel distributor and were cut into the right lengths/sizes using laser and or plasma cutters.

This background is provided in order to convey to the reader a small sense of my history with steel as well as a bit of information on how vehicles are put together in a low production environment.  There is nothing magic about how this is done, just simple steel products welded together by competent people who do this as a living.  I love metals and have spent a lot of my life around heavy equipment and its uses, especially in the coal mining industry.  Thus I can at least speak with some knowledge of the subject here on the Earth.  The interesting part is how to translate this to how we would do such things on the Moon.

Basic Things Needed for Lunar Industrialization

There are four basic things needed for basic lunar industrialization.

• Raw Materials
• Energy
• Manufacturing Infrastructure
• Workforce

Availability of Lunar Metals

It is well known from the literature (one example) on the Apollo samples (the greatest part of their legacy) that there is meteoric metals and nano phase iron in proportions up to 1%.  Apollo 16 samples, being from a highlands site has the greatest proportion of meteoric materials, which is to be expected as the highlands have the oldest regolith.  Thus if we were to do the most minimal processing of highlands regolith from a site at the North pole (my favored location for many reasons), then we can expect to obtain quite a bit of metal. Beneficiation, or concentrating, of this metal could be accomplished on the Moon with nothing more than an electromagnet and a dump truck rover.   There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that a robotic rover with a magnet could not pick up a minimum of 100 kilograms per hour of this meteoric metal.  This can be done without any of the exotic chemical or other methods of separating metals from their oxides on the Moon.

Melting and Forming the Metal

There are different ways of melting metal but they all require energy.  For the Moon there are two easy ways to do it.  The first way is to simply use the sun and all you need to do it is a fresnel lens.  Here is a video of a guy who does just that, with a very simple and lightweight system:

Here is a second and much faster method using a parabolic mirror:

If you notice the video closely you will see that they only used a small fraction of the available light on the parabolic mirror to melt the steel.  At the lunar north pole where up to 100% of the time it is sunlit (Northern hemisphere summer) there is plenty of sun to support a continuous operating foundry.

The second means, using indirect sunlight in the form of electrical power, is achieved by using an induction furnace.  The next video shows that:

So what we have here are two different methods of melting metals that would be directly applicable to melting metals on the Moon, even with a lot of rock contamination, which since rock is lighter, floats to the top and is scooped off as slag.

The next video shows metal pouring and forming.  The sand mold method of metal casting is as old as the Hittite empire, long before Rome.  The video here is from a British television program called “Metal Monkeys”.

Remember at the beginning of this article where in figure one the trailer is made from welded pieces of steel?  It is quite simple using the sand mold process to make the basic parts that go into the trailer frame construction.  On the Moon it would be done using sintering of the regolith using microwaves after forming the desired part:  Figure 2 shows my concept of the induction furnace and mold that would be used to build structures on the Moon:

Figure 2: This shows a vacuum induction furnace on the surface of the Moon that would be used to melt and pour metal. Click to Enlarge.

Uses of Metal On the Moon

There is no end of the uses of metal on the Moon.  For simple parts and objects the manufacturing infrastructure is minimal.  All that was used in the construction of our trailers in figure 1 was saw horses to hold the frame, C clamps to hold the pieces together while they are tacked together, and then a bridge crane to lift the assembly and turn it over during the production process.  Obviously you need a welder as well, but on the Moon welding is very easy and you could use a laser welder, which requires a lot of power but little in the way of consumables or good old concentrated sunlight again.

Figure 3 shows an Eagle Engineering design of the LOTRAN rover on the Moon:

Figure 3: LOTRAN Rover, made from aluminum tubes as can be seen in the drawing -- Click to Enlarge

Figure four below shows a lunar habitat with structure holding up the weight of the regolith radiation shielding:

Figure 4: 
From Eagle Engineering, Lunar Habitat and Support Structure for Regolith Shielding -- 
Click to Enlarge

In figure 3 and 4 there are many of the structural pieces that, rather than being brought up from the Earth, could be derived from local ISRU derived metals.  Even the habitats themselves could be made mostly from locally derived metals.  There is a class of steel called “Maraging Steel” that is a high nickel alloy that is very close to what you would have available from meteoric and nano phase iron derived from the regolith.

Slaying Sacred Space Cows With a Gestalt Tempered Blade

One of the sacred cows that drives the demand for a heavy lift vehicle is that ISRU is not ready for prime time, that it is too hard, and that it is something that will happen in 20, 50, or 100 years, pick your time.  A friend of mine who was on the Augustine II commission told me that Norm Augustine simply would not allow any discussion of ISRU as an enabling technology for transforming the Constellation program.  He said that he simply did not believe it was possible.  In another blog forum recently when I brought up the possibility of making rover parts from ISRU derive metal, the person I was interacting with simply refused to carry on the conversation as for me to even mention that was to shift the discussion into the non-credible.

After reading this somewhat long post I hope that the reader will get the idea that obtaining, melting, and forming metal is no big deal.  As someone who grew up with and continues to work with steel I find it astonishing when otherwise intelligent people simply dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.  There is absolutely nothing precluding a metals centric ISRU implementation on the Moon that would have an immediate upstream effect on the entire architecture for lunar/Mars exploration.

In all of the discussions about heavy lift, I have never been able to find anyone who can list more than a few payloads that require a heavy lifter.  These are things such as a habitats, pressurized rovers, power systems, and humans.  With a robust implementation of ISRU coupled with the landing of modest equipment with existing vehicles, the need for heavy lift is completely eliminated.

That is a sacred cow worth slaying…

Quelle:

Dennis Wingo is an advocate for the discussion of ways and means for the economic development of the solar system, to the benefit of the Earth. He writes the euphonious blog Dennis Wingo.

Pyroclastic Excavation |Moon

Explore the pyroclastics in the full LROC NAC frame, HERE!

An impact excavated low-reflectance pyroclastic formation, part of a landmark region of the Moon's nearside characterized by dark mantling deposits east of Copernicus. LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) observation M170613335L,, LRO orbit 10277, September 14, 2011. Image field of view 418 meters, angle of incidence 13.03° at 0.49 meters resolution from 44.83 kilometers. View the larger 500 meter field of view in the LROC Featured Image HERE [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Lillian Ostrach

LROC News System

Some regions of the Moon exhibit dark mantling deposits that were formed by fire-fountain style eruptions, similar to Strombolian or some Hawaiian eruptions. Unlike the effusively emplaced mare basalts, pyroclastic eruptions were more energetic because the erupted material contained more volatiles and formed volcanic glass beads. In some cases, pyroclastics are found in small, localized areas, surrounding a vent such as in Alphonsus crater or in Schrödinger basin.

Today's Featured Image is located within a larger regional pyroclastic deposit (5.470°N, 352.014°E; low-reflectance material) south of Sinus Aestuum, and is centered on a small impact crater (~170 m diameter) that excavated fresh pyroclastic material from depth. Since this crater is located within a regional pyroclastic deposit, the freshly-exposed pyroclastics appear lower reflectance than the surrounding surface, possibly as a result of ejecta emplacement from impacts (both near and far afield) that deposited higher-reflectance material and mixed the regolith (impact gardening).

LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) monochrome mosaic centered on the regional pyroclastic deposits south of Sinus Aestuum and east of Copernicus. Asterisk notes location of the field of view highlighted at high resolution in the LROC Featured Image released June 7, 2012. View the larger context image HERE [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State Universi Understanding the distribution, extent, and thickness of pyroclastic deposits can help constrain the volcanic history of the Moon and answer questions regarding the volatile content of the early Moon. For example, Apollo 17 samples of pyroclastic glass from the Taurus-Littrow Valley confirmed that fire-fountain eruptions occurred on the Moon and that the glass beads were rich in titanium as well as small amounts of zinc and sulfur (volatiles). More recently, scientists have improved upon the measured values for volatiles, such as carbon dioxide, water, fluoride, sulfur, and chlorine, in the pyroclastic glasses returned from the Apollo missions. Isn't it amazing how much we can learn from the Apollo samples?

Related Posts:

Aristarchus Spectacular!

A Dark Cascade at Sulpicius Gallus

Up from the depths

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Tycho |The Other Side

Summit of Tycho crater central peak seen from west-to-east; the rough material on the floor of the crater in the upper right formed as a massive pool of impact melt solidified. LROC NAC M181286769L,R

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Quelle:
#NASA, #JPL, #GSFC

Melt on a Rim

Impact melt started to flow back into the crater cavity before it solidified. Downslope is to the upper right, image width is 500 m, NAC M170205366L

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Quelle:

Continue reading "Melt on a Rim"

Flow Boundary in Mare Imbrium |LROC

The same field of view at a slightly less inclined morning incidence angle (60.84°), LROC NAC M129452673R, orbit 4211, May 25, 2010, resolution 0.46 meters from 37.66 kilometers [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

A small scarp is exposed in this high sunrise incidence angle (75.95°) Narrow Angle Camera frame, around 95 kilometers north by northeast of Mons La Hire in Mare Imbrium. The area to the east is raised relative to the area on the west of the scarp by as little as 10 meters. LROC NAC M177792062L, LRO orbit 11337, December 6, 2011; field of view 610 meters, resolution 0.6 meters per pixel from 43.86 kilometers. View the full-size LROC Featured Image HERE [NASA/GSFC/ArizonaState University].

Drew Enns

LROC News System

Today's Featured Image shows the boundary of a flow front in Mare Imbrium. Unlike other flows LROC has observed (granular, impact melt), these are lava flows! The flows are about 35 m thick, making them hard to observe unless the Sun is low and casting long shadows.

Apollo 15 imaged the flows early in the lunar morning, when the Sun was low on the horizon to help the low relief flows cast larger shadows!

Combining the observed geometric properties of these flows with viscosities calculated from the Apollo samples allow scientists to constrain how lava behaves on the Moon.

For context, the full, uncorrected approximate 2200 meter width of the field of view swept up in LROC NAC M129452673R. The area of interest is just left of center [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) context for the LROC Featured Image, released April 11, 2012 and narrowly focused near 30.593° N, 335.302° E. The WAC observation above was swept up from the orbiter during the same orbital pass as that of the Featured Image NAC frame. The large incidence angle brings out subtle changes in topography, enhancing the Imbrium lava flows. Image field of view is 35 kilometers. LROC WAC M177791761C (604nm), resolution 60 meters per pixel [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

The Imbrium flows are fairly thick, and the WAC context shows them extending for at least 120 km, but the flows continue for several hundred kilometers. Should we expect this? Because the Moon's gravity is weaker than the Earth's, we can expect lunar lava flows to be ~1.7 times as thick as a terrestrial flow of similar length! 

Flows of similar length on Earth have only been observed in flood basalts, which are large volumes of lava that were erupted quickly. 

This correlation indicates that the lunar lava flows must have erupted quickly as well. Even so, these flows are some of the few examples still visible on the Moon's surface, and it is unclear how their thickness and extent relate to the majority of volcanism that filled in the large basins resulting in the maria.

Check out more lava related feature posts below and explore the lava flows in the full LROC NAC Featured Image, HERE.

Related Posts:

Layers near Apollo 15 landing site

Layering in Euler Crater

Old Man River of Lava

Lunar Pioneer, LLP

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Moonbuggy Race April 13-14

NASA Great Moonbuggy Race is sponsored by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and Jacobs ESTS Group.

Approximately 100 returning and rookie teams from around the world will compete for a top-three finish at the 19th-annual NASA Great Moonbuggy Race, April 13-14, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.

More than 500 high school, college and university students from 20 states, as well as Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Italy and India, are expected to race their specially crafted lunar rovers or "moonbuggies."

Photos Moonbuggy Race 2011

Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

A lasting lesson from Apollo. The lunar exosphere gets into everything, fine as talcum, abrasive as broken glass, and a significant cumulative threat to seals and any and all working parts generally, whether biological and mechanical. Beyond its demonstrated mission threat the Moon's dusty environment is a delicate, "pristine" and important  part of a 4.5 billion year history of space weather near Earth. Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and geologist Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt moves forward with the patina of 22 hours activity on the lunar surface clinging to his suit. AS17-145-22157 [NASA/JSC/ALSJ].

The Moon's sodium tail, Potter and Morgan (1998).

The Lunar Dust Environment:
Expectations for the LADEE
Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX)

Mihaly Horanyi, Sternovsky & Shul

with Colette, Grün, Kempf, Srama & Mocker

43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, #2635

Introduction: The lunar dust environment is expected to be dominated by submicron-sized dust particles released from the Moon due to the continual bombardment by micrometeoroids, and due to plasma-induced near-surface intense electric fields. The Lunar Dust EXperiment (LDEX) is designed to map the spatial and temporal variability of the dust size and density distributions in the lunar environment on-board the upcoming Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission

LDEX is an impact detector, capable of measuring the mass of submicron sized dust grains. LDEX will also measure the collective signal of dust grains below the detection threshold for single dust impacts; hence it can search for the putative population of grains with r ~ 0.1 μm lofted over the terminator regions by plasma effects.

LDEX has been developed at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies (LASP/CCLDAS, University of Colorado at Boulder) and has a high degree of heritage based on similar instruments on the HEOS 2, Ulysses, Galileo, and Cassini missions. The LDEX flight model will be tested and calibrated at both the (Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg, Germany) and Boulder dust accelerator facilities.

At the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, March 21, 2012, Dr. Horányi summarized expected capabilities of LDEX and made predictions for its measurements in lunar orbit, based on current theoretical models. The authors also discussed a proposed LDEXPLUS instrument being developed for a possible LADEE follow-up mission to add the instrument's design capability for in-situ chemical analysis of impacting dust particles, perhaps to verify "the existence of water ice on the lunar surface and map the density of valuable resources of commercial interest".

Figure 1. LDEX EM and FM units and the schematic drawings of the instrument.

The LDEX instrument: The two expected sources of dust in the lunar environment are ejecta production due to continual bombardment by interplanetary meteoroids and lofting due to plasma effects. LDEX is an impact ionization dust detector with a sensor area of ~0.01 m\2. LDEX is a low risk, compact instrument and uses no flight software (Figure 1). In addition to individual dust impacts of grains with radii r > 0.3 μm, LDEX can identify a large population of smaller grains (0.1 < r < 0.3 μm) by measuring their collective signal.The expected impact rates, and the signature of lofted small grains expected over the terminators are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Expected impact rates on a 30x100 km orbit with its pericenter over the morning terminator.

Initial test and calibration of the LDEX FM model were done at the CCLDAS dust accelerator facility. Full calibrations are planned in early 2012 at both the Heidelberg and the Boulder facilities. Figure 3 shows the preliminary test results, indicating that LDEX will meet or exceed its measurement requirements.

Figure 3. Initial test results for the LDEX FM instrument showing the detected particle mass versus their velocity. At the expected impact speed of 1.6 km/s,

LDEX will detect particles with radii r > 0.4 μm. The ratio of detected and undetected particles matches the expected value due to the duty cycle of the electronics and the transparency of the screens that provide shielding and exclude the solar wind electrons from entering LDEX.

The LDEX-PLUS instrument extends the LDEX capabilities to also measure the chemical composition of the impacting particles with a mass resolution of M/ΔM > 30. Traditional methods to analyze surfaces of airless planetary objects from an orbiter are IR and gamma-ray spectroscopy, and neutron backscatter measurements. A complementary method is to analyze dust particles as samples of planetary objects from which they were released. The source region of each analyzed grain can be determined with accuracy at the surface that is approximately the altitude of the orbit.

This ‘dust spectrometer’ approach provides key chemical constraints for varying provinces on the lunar surfaces. LDEX-PLUS is of particular interest to verify from orbit the presence of water ice in the permanently shadowed lunar craters. LDEX-PLUS combines the impact detection capabilities of LDEX with a linear time-of-flight system, similar to the Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) instrument. Figure 4 shows an example time-of-flight mass spectrum of an ice-bearing dust grain.

Figure 4. Spectrum of a water ice particle obtained at ~ 4 km/s impact speed by the Cassini CDA instrument in Saturn's E ring. The dominant peaks are mass lines of water cluster ions (H2O)nH+, generated upon impact of an ice-bearing particle.

Schematic of documented species of horizon glow, such as the famous mid-lunar night imagery captured by Surveyor 7 in 1968.

Conclusions. LDEX, on-board LADEE, is scheduled to launch in May 2013 and will be capable of mapping the density distributions of both the large ejecta particles and the collective signal of small lofted grains. LDEX-PLUS, on-board a follow-up lunar mission, can collect a large number of samples from a greater part of the entire surface for analysis.

The instrument is especially sensitive to the metallic compounds of minerals and any species which easily form ions (e.g. water). The accuracy of the trajectory back-tracing to the surface is comparable to the altitude of the satellite. This in-situ method allows compositional surface mapping of the Moon. Since the dust spectrometer is particularly sensitive to refractory compounds which are difficult to access by other methods it is also complementary to remote sensing spectroscopy and an ion or neutral mass spectrometer. A ram pointing dust spectrometer and a nadir pointing remote sensing instrument collect data from approximately the same spot on the surface of the Moon, hence the combination of these measurements greatly enhances our ability to map the chemical composition of the surface and identify water-bearing regions.






An LDEX-PLUS type instrument can also address many of the science goals of a Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) regarding the surface chemistry of icy satellites. See original Conference abstract, HERE, for citations.

Lunar Horizon Glow (LHC) as televised (vidicon photography) in local night, early 1968 [NASA].

The 'Dust, Atmosphere, and Plasma: Moon and Small Bodies' (DAP-2012) meeting will take place in Boulder, June 6-8, 2012. Please visit our webpages http://ldap2012.colorado.edu/  to register and submit an abstract by 3/30/2012, if you plan to attend.


We are looking forward to see you in Boulder!




- Alan Stern and Mihaly Horanyi

Lunar Pioneer, LLP


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