Astronauts must return to Apollo 15 landing site moon And bring home some of its half-century-old excrement and hardware, a panel told NASA On Wednesday.
One team would land just north of the site at Mons Hadley – far enough away to avoid damaging it. From there, the astronauts will proceed to inspect the rover, lander base, instruments and power systems that the former crew left behind in 1971.
That equipment has endured for decades space Radiation and repeated heating and cooling cause nights to occur after lunar days. Scientists on Earth can study how the lunar environment affects the hardware over time. Taking a close look at urine and stool in the laboratory can reveal how the biological material changes and whether it affects the area around it.
That’ll be the basic information [for] “We need to understand how to engineer systems for lunar bases, for everything that humans take to the lunar surface,” said committee co-chair Dan Dumbacher.
The mission proposal came from a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which was asked by NASA to recommend future moon-landing sites far from the Moon’s south pole, where the agency already intends to build a long-term base. moon base. In a new reportThe committee members selected four non-polar sites – Bhabha Crater, Mons Hadley, Orientale Basinand Aristarchus Plateau – where they believe artemis astronaut Samples must be collected, observed and experimented on. He prioritized locations that he believed would give human explorers an advantage over unmanned robots.
The telescope’s survey was interrupted by a comet that no one knew existed
This so-called “flights“The term NASA used when assigning the task to the committee would be short, one-time visits. According to the report, because the poles lack the volcanic terrain found elsewhere on the Moon, as well as radioactive metals such as uranium and thorium, brief visits would supplement the base, not replace it.
Each mission will send a pair of astronauts to perform one to four moonwalks to within 2 kilometers – or 1.2 miles – of their lander. This distance is a previously established “walkback” limit that NASA has long established and the Committee believes the Agency should strive to increase. The panel also chose landing sites that offer the most opportunities for geology, biology, human health and physics research.
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The top pick, Bhabha Crater, is located inside the largest and oldest crater in the solar system, and its rocks may have fallen down when a massive impact occurred. Is located at far side of the moonThe crew will have to land further from home than any humans have done before, allowing NASA to test how astronauts deal with isolation.
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The site is also prime for telescopes, said James Day, the committee’s second chair.
“It’s almost an unmatched place to do radio astronomy, and the reason is it’s in a quiet region on the far side of the Moon. It’s protected from the noise that we create here on Earth,” Day said. “This will give us information about the early universe, before the first stars or galaxies formed.”
Bhabha Crater is the National Academies Committee’s top choice among four recommended moon landing sites.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
In Orientale, the moon’s youngest large basin, about 3.8 billion years old, astronauts will collect boulders from deep in the crust that may show whether the moon was once completely molten. They will also install a detector for gravitational waves in space-time. This device could alert astronomers months in advance neutron stars Collide, said the committee leaders.
Finally, the Aristarchus Plateau, an Apollo destination that NASA never reached, contains volcanic deposits that could yield water. It extends about 60 miles, so crews there would benefit most from the simple open rover the committee believes NASA should build.
In its recommendations, the panel said NASA should continue to conduct detailed mapping of the Moon’s orbit, build Devices that can operate in moonlightand installed a communications system that kept the crew in constant contact with Earth, even on the far side.
NASA will decide when and in what order to fly the missions.
“All four of these sites will give us profound knowledge,” Day said, “not just about our moon, but about our solar system, and obviously about us.”