(Continued from page 2) Our informal group of interested space organizations met in Houston at the ‘Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the Twenty-First Century’ Conference. Gordon Woodcock and Gregg Maryniak sent a joint letter to NASA requesting the surplus Apollo gamma-ray spectrometer which is one of a number of candidate detectors for water. SSI engaged Dr. Gay Canough, a physicist who has supported the Institute’s lunar prospector work since its inception, to spearhead our efforts on private probes. (See Events Schedule, page 6.) 1989 Plans As the result of intense activity during 1988, this year will see a whole series of related lunar prospector developments. The cornerstone of these projects will be a special lunar prospector workshop which will immediately preceed the 1989 Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing. The Conference will have a special evening session summarizing the results of this workshop. (The summary session will be open to all registered Conference participants.) In addition, SSI has proposed a session on lunar polar science for the 20th Lunar and Planetary Institute Conference in March of 1989. SSI Trustee James Burke, has agreed to chair this session which will be a very useful precursor to our May workshop. The Institute will also co-sponsor a weekend discussion on lunar probes in Houston just prior to the LPI meeting. 1989 will also see a growing international discussion on simple lunar probes. The International Space University has approved a suggestion by ISU faculty member, Gregg Maryniak, that one of ISU’ two Summer Design Projects for ’89 be the design of lunar polar orbiting probes. This design project will involve top graduate students from around the world and will build on SSI’s workshop. In addition, we hope to convene a meeting at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France (the site of ISU 1989) to discuss launch opportunities for these missions. SSI’s extensive work on the lunar polar prospector has been made possible by the contributions of the members and Senior Associates of the Institute. Thanks to your support we are now spearheading an international effort. With your continued assistance we will provide a chemical map of the entire moon and solve the mystery of the lunar ice! ■ Many thanks to Ronald Jones of Bartlesville, OK for the beautiful photo montage representations of Lunar Getaway Special and Lunar Quicksat Spacecraft. Thanks also to David E. Ways of Pasadena, CA for the CAD depictions of the Lunar Getaway Special Spacecraft Interjectory. Additional drawings courtesy NASA and JPL. SSI Awards Lunar Probe Contract to ETM Gay E. Canough Space Studies Institute (SSI) has contracted with ExtraTerrestrial Materials, Inc. (ETM) to manage a working group to design a lunar polar probe. The probe will map the chemical composition of the Moon and detect whether or not frozen water and other volatiles are trapped at the Moon’s poles. The ETM team is headed by Dr. Gay Canough. Dr. Canough is a PhD. physicist with 10 years experience in designing and building detectors for nuclear and particle physics. She was on the faculty at Notre L.P. Lehman Dame University working on the electronics and computing system for a gamma ray “Telescope” being constructed at Notre Dame. ETM presented a paper titled “Unmanned Scientific Mission to the Asteroids” at the 1987 SSI Conference on Space Manufacturing. At present Gay Canough and her partner, L. P. Lehman, are preparing a paper under contract for SSI on space debris for the 1989 SSI Space Manufacturing Conference. Lunar Prospector Quotes Each major study of U.S. Space options has discussed the importance of a lunar prospecting mission: The President’s National Commission on Space Report Continuing robotic prospector missions, using the techniques of remote sensing and of on-site measurements to discover and characterize usable materials on our Moon, Mars and its moons, and accessible asteroids. A very high priority should be given to discovering any resources that may be frozen near the lunar poles, to determining the potential water and hydrocarbon resources on the surfaces of Phobos, Deimos, and near-surface layers of Mars, and to charting and analyzing all of the asteroids that pass close to Earth. To obtain a great value in knowledge from a small investment, we should send robotic explorer probes to the Moon equipped with sophisticated sensors. It is a first priority to search the permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles, where ices containing carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen may be found. We therefore recommend: A robotic lunar polar prospector to examine the entire surface of the Moon from low orbit. The prospector spacecraft should be equipped with remote sensors to examine the polar craters. We also recommend: Probe missions to drive penetrators into the lunar surface, for on-site analysis at particularly interesting or valuable locales and missions to return samples for analysis from regions selected from prospector and probe data. It will then be time for people to return. The resource development of the Moon would be altered drastically if volatile elements were found frozen in ices in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. In principle, all of the propellant needs for hydrogen/oxygen rockets operating between the lunar surface and low Earth orbit could be met from lunar sources if such volatiles were found. The needs of lunar outposts, bases, and their biospheres for water could also be met from those sources. In earlier sections we have, therefore, set a very high priority on remote sensing and sample return missions to examine those special locations. Astronaut Sally Ride’s “Leadership” Report The discovery of [lunar] water or other volatiles would be extremely significant, and would have important implications for the location of a habitable outpost. NASA Office of Explorations’s “Beyond Earth’s Boundaries” Only a small part of the Moon has been mapped for resource availability and concentration: we are particularly interested in searching for areas that may hold hydrogen or water.
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