More than a dozen mysterious caverns lie hundreds of feet beneath the lunar surface, and NASA is considering a plan to send an extreme-terrain rover to rappel down and explore them. The reason? Caves could hold clues to the history of the Moon. Caverns may also provide ready-made habitats for future crewed missions, sheltering astronauts from the extreme temperatures, radiation, and asteroids that periodically impact the surface.
Called Moon Diver, the rover would hitch a ride on a rocket in the mid-2020s and touch down a few hundred feet from one of the moon’s deep pits on the Sea of Tranquility basin. There, it would deploy a smaller rover, Axel, to rappel hundreds of feet into the large pits that pockmark the lunar surface, reports Smithsonian Magazine. Instruments in the rover’s wheel wells would be used to analyze the caverns, collecting data on the ancient rock beneath the surface.
Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traversed part of the Sea of Tranquility 50 years ago.
At the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 20, NASA scientists presented their plans for the mission. Laura Kerber, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher and principal investigator of the Moon Diver mission, said, “There is a nice poetry to this mission concept. Apollo 11 landed along the edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Fifty years later, we are going to dive down right into the middle of it.”
The Moon’s open caverns were formed when the ceilings collapsed into deep lava tubes under the Lunar surface. The exposed caverns would allow scientists to virtually time travel, giving them access to billion-year-old rock that could help researchers unravel the Lunar past.
To study the ancient Moon rocks, the two-wheeled Axel rover would be equipped with instruments including a variety of cameras for close-up and long-distance imaging of the walls. A microscope would be used to analyze the cavern’s mineral content. A spectrometer would analyze the chemistry of the rock.
The Moon Diver mission has been proposed as one of NASA’s low-cost missions. It will compete against proposals for missions to Neptune’s moon Triton and Jupiter’s satellite Io.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.