Tag Archives: moon

Water on the Moon, Slush on the Desk

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I was very excited to see the news about the latest results from lunar survey missions about the presence of water on the moon.

(Moon Mineralogy Mapper composite image. Click to enlarge. Left: Sunlight reflected off the near side of the moon. Right: Infrared image showing water and hydroxl molecule signatures near the poles. “The blue arrow indicates Goldschmidt crater, a large feldspar-rich region with a higher water and hydroxyl signature.” NASA image.)

The full story is here, but here are the highlights:

The observations were made by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3 (“M-cubed”), aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft have confirmed the find….

“When we say ‘water on the Moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles,” explained Carle Pieters, M3’s principal investigator from Brown University, Providence, R.I. “Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the Moon’s surface.

I have a personal reason for being excited about this finding, and since so few people look at this blog I assume all of you already know what that reason is. So let’s move on to the slush on my desk.

Literary slush — unsolicited manuscripts, proposals, and queries — moves on and off my desk in waves. Reading it can be mind-numbing, but it can also be interesting and sometimes even entertaining. It’s not often a source of inspiration, but my writing friend Jim Hines wrote an ode to the slush pile entitled “Slush Reading, Seuss Style” that is absolutely fantastic. Check it out!

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Apollo Test Launch, 45 Years Ago, and Lunar Mapping Today

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Forty-five years ago today — September 18, 1964 — NASA launched a Saturn-1 booster from Cape Canaveral in mission SA-7, also known as Apollo “Boiler Plate 15.” The launch demonstrated the Launch Escape System (LES) for the first time.

Anything Apollo-related of course reminds me of the moon, but I’ll skip the shameless plug in favor of some exciting news about the current LRO mission:

After two months of checkout and calibration, NASA’s $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high mapping orbit Tuesday and scientists said Thursday the spacecraft’s instruments are delivering intriguing clues about the possible presence of water ice.

The exciting news and “intriguing clues” are indications that hydrogen deposits may exist not only in permanently-shadowed craters near the south pole, but elsewhere on the moon as well — perhaps buried under lunar soil. Whether they’re water, or ammonia, or methane, or something else is unclear, but there appears to be something there, and probably something useful. Read the whole Spaceflight Now report here.

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Of X-Planes and Moon Rocks

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Fifty years ago today — September 17, 1959 — Scott Crossfield made the first powered flight in an X-15, dropped off the wing of NASA’s B-52 flying out of Edwards AFB, CA.


(Cutaway drawing of the X-15. NASA Photo E62-7893.)

Here’s a NASA story commemorating the first flight, and a nice feature on Crossfield and his career.

And forty years ago today, the Smithsonian Institution unveiled the first lunar rock ever put on public display: brought back by Apollo-11, of course. Today I wonder if we have the national will to go back to the moon, or to go anywhere; the recent Augustine Panel noted that it’s technically feasible, but by damn it better be technically feasible by the 2020s if we did it back in the 1960s. It’s all a matter of money, and whether we see it as a cost or as an investment.

For the moment we have to content ourselves with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, due to smash into crater Cabeus-A in about three weeks to try to verify if the hydrogen concentrations detected on the moon are in the form of water ice.

I hope LCROSS finds water, and more than expected . . . but even if it doesn’t, that’s only one spot in one crater. It will take other investigations to prove whether the moon is completely devoid of water. (Why I care: The characters in my novel collect ice that’s been dredged up microgram by microgram out of the bottom of Faustini crater, and since Faustini was on the “short list” of possible LCROSS impact points [according to a graphic shown during the 11 September press conference] I think my fictional world is still plausible for now.)

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50 Years Ago: World's First Lunar Probe

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Fifty years ago today — September 12, 1959 — the Soviet Union launched the Luna-2 mission on a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. As noted, Luna-2 was the first probe to hit the moon: it impacted east of the Sea of Serenity (Mare Serenitatis).


(Luna-2. Image from NASA’s Space Science Data Center.)

One interesting element: Luna-2 carried a flag with the USSR’s hammer-and-sickle and a “September 1959” banner, making it the first mission to plant a flag on the moon.

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Genesis Crash

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Five years ago today — September 8, 2004 — NASA’s Genesis sample return capsule crash-landed in the Utah desert. The spacecraft was returning with samples collected from the solar wind, but its drogue parachute failed as it descended. It hit the ground traveling 311 km/hr.

(Genesis sample container crash site. Click to enlarge. USAF photo from NASA web page.)

The damaged container was taken into a clean room as soon as possible so NASA scientists could analyze the sample fragments. This page explains how some of the Genesis findings solved a mystery about the isotopic composition of lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo missions.

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Problems in the Search for Lunar Ice

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Last week controllers lost contact with the Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, which was about to embark on a new series of observations in conjunction with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now those radar observations won’t happen, as explained in this New Scientist article.

That sets back the search for ice in lunar craters, which will be vital to future lunar outposts. But this passage especially caught my eye:

Chandrayaan-1 flew over “a lot of little craters that looked like they had ice” and mapped 95 per cent of the polar regions before its mission ended,

according to Stewart Nozette of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. That sounds encouraging.

And provided that LCROSS — the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — doesn’t experience another in-flight emergency, we should get a closer look at the contents of one crater in just a few weeks.

But no matter what any of these probes reveal: in the world of my novel, WALKING ON THE SEA OF CLOUDS, the colonists retrieve ice from the permanently shaded floor of Faustini Crater.

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Latest Results: Courting Literary Agents

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After four months of trying to find literary representation, my scorecard looks like this:

  • 53 agents queried
  • 5 requested partials or additional information
  • 2 full manuscripts sent
  • 35 rejections

Of the 18 agents who still have my query, I expect I will never hear from many of them: some are very clear in their guidelines that they only contact people whose work they want to see. So that “rejection” number is low, but I have no way to know how low.

I never knew there were so many agents, and of course I’m only contacting those who represent science fiction and fantasy — a very small subset of the whole literary field. I still have a long list of agents I haven’t queried yet, but I admit that I’m starting to get discouraged. But I keep hoping that one day an agent will like my near-future science fiction story of survival and sacrifice on the moon, even though science fiction is lagging behind fantasy these days, and like it enough to take into those publishers who don’t accept unagented manuscripts.

And until then … we keep knocking on the metaphorical door.

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Space Imaging — From Explorer to Kepler

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Fifty years ago in space history — August 7, 1959 — the Explorer-6 satellite launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor Able rocket.

(Explorer-6 satellite. Click to enlarge. NASA image.)

Explorer-6 was small and spheroidal, with four solar array “paddles,” and was launched to study space radiation, cosmic rays, and other phenomena. It also carried “a scanning device designed for photographing the earth’s cloud cover,” according to this NASA page, and sent back the first crude television images of earth from space.

And 40 years ago today — on August 7, 1969 — the Soviet Union launched the Zond-7 circumlunar spacecraft from Baikonur on a Proton-K* rocket. Zond-7 performed a lunar flyby on August 11 and returned to earth on August 14, carrying color photographs it had taken of the Earth and the Moon.

We’ve come a long way in terms of imaging technology, with the new Kepler space observatory having “captured the light of a gas giant orbiting a star over a thousand light years away.” From the Spaceflight Now story, “Kepler [was] able to detect the light of the gas giant, determine its phases and know when it had vanished from view behind its sun.” Here’s an animation showing the light curve Kepler detected and its interpretation.

Amazing.

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*It amazes me that the Proton rocket is still operating out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and I’m thankful that I got to see those operations.

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Elusive Success, and Believing In Our Work

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A literary agent whom I hoped to query with my novel posted this message on Twitter yesterday:

Straight SF is very very hard to sell right now.

I wrote back that I hope I’m first in line when that trend changes.

I believe I’ve written a good book: it’s certainly the best book I could write at this time, and several early readers gave me very tough critiques that made it even better. I’ve got a great cover quote from a bestselling author, and have done everything I know how to do to increase its chances of success. Yet it is very possible that the current market will not accept a near-future, realistic, essentially hopeful SF story about colonists struggling to survive on the moon.

The uncertainty of succeeding with this novel makes me wonder . . .

In the grand if not the grandest scheme of things, does it matter, the success of a single person in any field of endeavor? What inventor or artist or thinker, if disease or injury or other calamity had prevented their accomplishments, would not have been replaced eventually? If not by a similar or even identical art (more likely in the realm of science than in any other), then by one that would be equally admired, equally revered?

So runs the train of thought headlong to disaster.

No — we must believe that our works have value for the moment and more than the moment. We must labor as if what we produce will make a difference on some scale — if not the universal, on the global scale; if not global, continental; if not continental, local; if not local, personal, even if limited to ourselves.

And so, onward.

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Flying By Mars … and Smashing Into the Moon

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On July 31, 1969 — forty years ago today — Mariner-6 flew by Mars. Along with Mariner-7, Mariner-6 comprised a dual-spacecraft mission to study the Martian surface and atmosphere. The Mariner-6 flyby gave NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory the chance to make minute changes to the profile before Mariner-7 flew by. As noted on the National Space Science Data Center page,

On 29 July, 50 hours before closest approach, the scan platform was pointed to Mars and the scientific instruments turned on. Imaging of Mars began 2 hours later. For the next 41 hours, 49 approach images (plus a 50th fractional image) of Mars were taken through the narrow-angle camera. At 05:03 UT on 31 July the near-encounter phase began, including collection of 26 close-up images…. Closest approach occurred at 05:19:07 UT at a distance of 3431 km from the martian [sic] surface.

But no, it wasn’t Mariner-6 that smashed into the moon: Forty-five years ago today, in 1964, the Ranger-7 spacecraft impacted the surface of the moon. It had been launched on July 28th, and sent back over 4,000 close-up images of the lunar surface before it hit.

So where did Ranger-7 hit? Mare Nubium (the Sea of Clouds):


(Final image taken by Ranger-7 camera A, July 31, 1964, of the floor of Mare Nubium, 2-1/2 seconds before impact. NASA image.)

If you’re not sure why Mare Nubium is significant to me, read a little further and it will all become clear.

Another lunar impact happened ten years ago today — July 31, 1999 — when the Lunar Prospector spacecraft hit the moon. It was deliberately aimed into a crater near the south pole, where it was suspected cometary ice may have been deposited. The mission planners hoped that the Lunar Prospector would hit a patch of icy soil and release a plume of water that sensors on earth would detect; however, the detectors did not pick up the signature of a watery plume. The NASA press release outlined several possible explanations for the failure to detect any water:

  • the spacecraft might have missed the target area;
  • the spacecraft might have hit a rock or dry soil at the target site;
  • water molecules may have been firmly bound in rocks as hydrated mineral as opposed to existing as free ice crystals, and the crash lacked enough energy to separate water from hydrated minerals;
  • no water exists in the crater and the hydrogen detected by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft earlier is simply pure hydrogen;
  • studies of the impact’s physical outcome were inadequate;
  • the parameters used to model the plume that resulted from the impact were inappropriate;
  • the telescopes used to observe the crash, which have a very small field of view, may not have been pointed correctly;
  • water and other materials may not have risen above the crater wall or otherwise were directed away from the telescopes’ view.

All of this is important to any future lunar outposts, since any amount of recoverable water on the moon will mean fewer resources that have to be brought up from earth. (It’s important in my novel, too, part of which takes place as colonists bring back ice collected at the south pole to their station on the edge of Mare Nubium … but that’s literally another story.*)

Today — and I mean today in 2009, not today in space history — the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is en route to its own impact with a shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. It will impact on or about October 9th. You can read more about LCROSS on this NASA page.

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*Still no luck yet in finding a literary agent or publisher willing to take on my novel of survival and sacrifice on the moon. But someday I hope WALKING ON THE SEA OF CLOUDS will see print.

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