Nasa is using the Hubble space telescope to hunt for desirable locations to build a human base on the moon. The agency is scouting a variety of sites on the lunar surface for large deposits of useful minerals that astronauts could turn into air and power to help humans live in space.
The research is part of United States President’s George Bush’s ”vision for space exploration” that calls for the US to revisit the moon by 2018, with a possible mission to Mars to follow.
Bruce Hapke, a planetary scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the Nasa team, said they were using the giant space telescope to search for a mineral called ilmenite. An oxide of iron and titanium found in soil samples brought back by the Apollo missions, the compound contains oxygen as well as hydrogen and helium absorbed from the solar wind. Heating the mineral releases the flammable gases, which could be burnt to generate electricity. Iron trapped in the mineral might eventually be used to produce building materials such as steel to construct a lunar base.
Hapke said: ”This is very much a long-term project but one of the objectives is to find sites where a base could be built.”
The team, led by Jim Garvin, chief scientist at Nasa, has used Hubble’s extraordinary resolution to peer at features on the moon’s surface just 50m across using receivers that pick up ultraviolet light. The project finished at the weekend and the first results are expected in October.
The team looked at three locations. Two of these were close to where the crews of Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 touched down in the early 1970s. The astronauts found varying amounts of ilmenite at several locations and the Hubble experiment is partly aimed at discovering how easy those deposits are to find.
”We’re looking at those two sites because we know what’s there,” said Hapke, who worked on the analysis of the Apollo samples. This is one of the first projects to point Hubble at the moon, he added.
The third site under scrutiny was a 42km-wide crater called Aristarchus, near the moon’s equator. The crater lies near the edge of a plateau that rises about 2 000m above surrounding lava fields.
Scientists have long been interested in Aristarchus because measurements made by previous missions suggest the impact that formed the crater threw up material from beneath the surface. Some of this could contain useful minerals, Hapke said. – Guardian Unlimited Â