Shilling for Space

by guest blogger Ken

Now that this week's Carnival of Space is up and running over at the Planetary Society website, it's time to start work on my hosting of the Carnival next week at Out of the Cradle. I'm here today to encourage everyone to get something posted online, or point me to something that would be interesting.

The structure that I've adopted is as follows:

-Cislunar space
-Cis-Asteroid Belt (Cisasterian? Cis-Belt?)
-The promethean planets and planetoid cloud
-Interstellar galactic space
-Trans-galactic space

I'm hoping that the first section is the longest, but we'll see how the submissions turn out.

This is just another facet of trying to get the word out to the public about space. Long time readers know that I do a lot of "shilling for space" in my community, and there are a lot of different ways of doing it. Let's see, so far this year I've organized NSS space displays for the sneak previews of "Astronaut Farmer", junior judged at the local the science fair (pdf), co-chaired a space conference (yes, that's a picture of me and my co-chair, Carol Johnson, on p. 43 of the new adAstra), and talked to the local astronomy society about the New Moon (I should show up in the August newsletter). I'm going to try to arrange a Moon display for the opening of "In the Shadow of the Moon", a speaking slot at the local FenCon, and maybe something for World Space Week. We've also got our Santa Space Toy drive coming up for the holidays. That's one of my favorites, where the chapter collects a whole bunch of real-space-related toys and donates them en masse to the local Santa's Helpers. I also help keep the North Texas Space Yahoo Group up to date. Throw the Lunar Library on top of that (coming up on it's one year birthday!), and I think I can say I do my fair share to help create a grass-roots level groundswell of support for space activities, both current and potential future.

It'd be nice if more and more folks went out more often to do the same thing. There are of course countless individuals who do exactly that, but more often than not they are from inside the industry. Planetarium workers are a good example. They do a great job focusing school kids on the wonders of deep space, but often their knowledge base for near-Earth human activities is much weaker (as well as knowledge about the Moon). Members of NSS are often industry insiders, and are able to do things like corporate-sponsored space exploration merit badge activities. And then there are the freelancers. The wildcards in the mix. Sometimes dangerous to those with vested interests, because the message they convey is not tied to any agenda associated with cash flows. Sometimes dangerous to the public because they have crappy communications skills.

Luckily I seem to have developed strong training skills, so I can be effective at communicating space to listeners. One of the goals of ISU is to create a cadre of young space workers/future leaders who can speak and communicate across disciplines, so that experience helped, as did the NASA Academy, which applies the ISU model to potential future NASA leaders. Plus a lot of professional experience, like yesterday at work where I gave a 2.5 hour training session on the basics of reading a credit agreement to a bunch of fresh-out (of college) new hires. Monday is the basics of the security agreement. Fun stuff.

But I can't do the Carnival of Space alone, so I encourage all readers to get something posted on the web and let me know. What would you want a bunch of home-schooled kids to know about space? Please make a contribution to increasing grass-roots level knowledge of and excitement in space.

A Heterogenous Moon

Since the end of the Apollo program, and the analysis of all the samples returned from those expeditions, the orthodox view of the moon has been one of dreary, dusty, homogeneity. Oh, there were things like Mascons, and your occasional magnetic anomaly to spicen things up somewhat, but the Moon was thought to be for the most part bone dry, boring, and overall pretty much the same wherever you went (with only minor difference for highlands vs. maria). Over the last several years, new data and new theories are starting to question that orthodoxy, painting the picture of a Moon that is potentially far more interesting than had been previously thought--both scientifically and economically.

Lunar Polar Deposits
The first major crack in the orthodox view of the moon came with the detection by both the Lunar Prospector and Clementine orbiters of potential hydrogen concentrations in the lunar polar regions. It had long been speculated by some scientists that the polar regions could possibly serve as a "cold-trap" that could keep volatiles from escaping back into space, however here was some hard evidence that that might very well be the case. Now this data is not without controversy. Recent data from the Arecibo radio telescope try to call the original data into question, however there are possible good explanations for that contradictory evidence, and the idea of lunar polar concentrations of volatiles has gains considerable traction recently. We don't know a whole lot (yet) about the form of these volatiles (it could be water ice, hydrogen molecules trapped by the regolith, or maybe something else entirely), and are not entirely sure of their origin (cometary impacts, solar wind implantation, etc), but the general scientific consensus appears to support the idea that there is at least something interesting going on.

Ni-Fe Meteorites
Another recent attempt at challenging the orthodox view of the moon has come from research done by a good friend of mine, Dennis Wingo. In his book, Moonrush, Wingo makes the case based on recent research for the possibility of intact platinum-group-metal-bearing nickel-iron meteorite impacts on the moon. Wingo's case was based on models that predict the impact velocity distribution of objects striking the moon, computer models that predict the effect of impacts on the impacting body, and data on the number and distribution of Ni-Fe asteroids in the solar system and impact craters on the Moon. If he's right, there's a very strong possibility that there are economically interesting concentrations of nickel, iron, and platinum group metals on the moon.

Now, while the idea of lunar polar volatiles has gained considerable respect within the scientific community, Wingo's hypothesis hasn't gained anywhere near as much traction yet. As Wendell Mendell likes reminding Dennis at various conferences, there's very little evidence from the Apollo lunar samples of his hypothesis. Fortunately, Dennis provided several methods in his book for trying to falsify his hypothesis.

Transient Lunar Phenomena
The most recent challenge to the homogeneous Moon orthodoxy comes in the form of some papers recently published in the journal Icarus regarding Transient Lunar Phenomena. A much simplified overview was provided by Space.com. The work, carried out by Crotts and Hummel of Columbia University in New York, is a rather fascinating read (though very, very complicated--I'm not sure I understood more than 25% of the details). Their main conclusions were that there's good reason to believe that TLPs are real, they appear to be strongly correlated with specific geographic regions, and they appear strongly correlated to lunar outgassing. This outgassing might possibly lead to discoveries of gas pockets below the lunar surface in several locations, which depending on their makeup could be extremely useful for future lunar development. On a substantially more controversial note, Paper II by Crotts and Hummels postulates a mechanism that could lead to substantial subsurface ice deposits in the regions where TLPs are occurring (particularly in the region of Aristarchus crater). While these ice deposits would have been small enough that the resolution of previous neutron spectrometers and such might very well have missed them, this hypothesis is a long way from proven. If the existence of substantial subsurface gas and ice deposits do prove out though, it could have some very important scientific and economic ramifications. Crotts discusses some methods that they are currently using and some future methods for trying to validate or falsify their hypotheses, including using automated telescopes with computer algorithms watching for TLP events. The hope is that by detecting an event early, additional telescopes and sensors can be brought to bear, possibly providing a lot more useful information about what is going on. With several orbiters planned for the near future, the potential for getting close-up data on these events is even more intriguing. It should be a fun topic to watch.


While many of these hypotheses still have a long way to go before they've been proven out, it's interesting to see that the orthodox view of the moon as being boring from both a scientific and economic perspective begin to change. We've got a long way to go yet, and some of these ideas might not pan out, or might end up not being as economically interesting as hoped. However, it's really starting to look like the Moon may very well be a far more interesting place than anyone imagined.

[Note: this post is part of the 14th weekly Carnival of Space being held at Universe Today. Check out some of the other posts if you have the time]