Is NASA Planning To "Terraform" Part of the Moon? Not Quite

MarkWhittington writes: A story in Popular Science suggested that NASA is mulling a plan to "terraform" part of the moon. The term is more than a little misleading, as it implies making a portion of the moon livable for humans. The actual plan, being funded by the space agency as part of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program is exciting nevertheless. The idea is to deploy reflectors around the rim of the Shackleton Crater, a region at the moon's South Pole where ice is thought to exist in permanent shadows. The reflectors would focus light onto select areas to provide power for robotic explorers. In this manner, the robots would not have to be equipped with protection against the cold inside the crater and would not have to be powered by plutonium-fueled RTGs. Temperatures inside the shadowed regions of Shackleton plunge to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit.

Comments

Fun stuff....

[JoeMerchant]

Just hope they don't end up vaporizing away all the (currently solid) H2O before we can capture it.

Re:Fun stuff....

[viperidaenz]

You could have RTFA and saw the bit where it says

The strategy would be to send rovers into Shackleton, powered by the reflected solar light, and set up a kind of base of operations within the crater. Then the rovers would make forays into the darkened regions under battery power to prospect for ice. They would return to the illuminated spots to warm up and recharge. Later, the same arrangement would be made for mining robots, extracting the ice for use by human settlers.

They don't plan on shining sunlight on the ice

Re:Fun stuff....

[JoeMerchant]

I saw that bit - what I didn't see was hard data on where the ice actually is (because nobody knows), or any estimation of what the solar reflection into the crater will do to peak temperatures within the crater. With any luck at all, things won't be getting out of hand, better to try than not to try. But, if we are fortunate and the ice is deposited as thin frost on the cave entrances, we'll have to be careful to charge the rovers a good distance from the caves to avoid sublimating too much away (sublimation point of H2O in hard vacuum is 150K, or -123C / -190F). Even driving a "warm" rover into the cave might start the process...

launch cost mirrors vs. a teeny tinny PU RTG?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirrors? Really?
WTF. Just make the damn plutonium-fueled RTG's happen instead.

Yeah, I know:
-Because: launching radioactive evilness will kill everybody. (This time, unlike the last 28+ times we have done it.)
-Because: The DOE or whoever does not have enough refined PU238 these days. Boo Hoo, make some more, damn it.
Are we a first world country with functioning space and nuclear energy programs or not? (Maybe we should outsource RTG's to SpaceX too? Once Elon Musk has some breeder reactors in the corporate fold he is pretty much ready to get the white cat, island fortress, and inscrutable henchmen. :) Why the hell not.)

While we are at it, that is: sending mass up and mucking around on the rim of a permanently shadowed crater.
Why don’t we send up some pipe, a thermal fluid, turbine, etc. with reservoirs on the sun side and shade side of the rim. Not sure how efficient a Stirling engine really is, but permanent shade and direct sun sound pretty ideal. We could even beam power to the damn rovers, making Nikola T. happy.

Mirrors, uhg.

Re:launch cost mirrors vs. a teeny tinny PU RTG?

[tomhath]

It's Green Energy. They don't want to start Anthropogenic Lunar Warming

Re:launch cost mirrors vs. a teeny tinny PU RTG?

[PopeRatzo]

Mirrors? Really?
WTF. Just make the damn plutonium-fueled RTG's happen instead.

The sun will last longer than the plutonium.

I guess when your only tool is a shotgun, everything starts to look like a clay pigeon.

Re:Fahrenheit?

[Bing Tsher E]

Are they still using musty old units that were spun up out of nothing during the French Revolution? That metre that was supposedly a perfect multiple of the earth's radius? (oops!) What happened to the 10 month calendar?

I have several French coins from the era, when they thought they had done a big enough thing to start renumbering the calendar years. Coins for a little while were numbered 'The year 2' and 'the year 3' and so on.

Those dumb Revolutionary Committees. All we have left from their little ego trip (the French reset and did their revolution again a few times since then) are their arbitrary units of measure that aren't scaled to anything particular in the human experience.

Re:-173.333 Celsius

[penguinoid]

100 K