Space Mining Entrepreneurs Pitch Invisible Obama and Romney

No U.S. president has waxed as poetically about mining the moon the way John F. Kennedy did about landing on it. But that didn’t stop four entrepreneurs from making their best pitches Sept. 11 to two empty chairs, standing in for President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Neither the Obama nor Romney campaigns had accepted invitations to discuss space policy here at the Space 2012 conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Their no-shows inspired Robert Wegeng, chief engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, to pay tongue-in-cheek homage to Clint Eastwood’s “invisible Obama” act at the recent Republican National Convention. Wegeng set up two chairs yesterday and asked his space mining panelists to address both the invisible Obama and invisible Romney with ideas for mining water and minerals from the moon, Mars and asteroids.

“Mr. President, do you want a position in history as a leader of the free world, as a representative of a civilization and species that did not dwindle and fall under the burdens of technological advancement?” asked Jim Keravala, CEO of the Shackleton Energy Co. “You have the opportunity for historic recognition and votes.”

The Shackleton Energy Co., founded in Del Valle, Texas. has worked on technologies needed to mine water ice from the moon and set up refueling stations both on the lunar surface and in Earth orbit. It was one of four U.S. companies represented yesterday on the AIAA panel.

Keravala told the absent U.S. president that he could set a leadership example by helping to commercialize space — something that would lead to political benefits for the president (or the presidential challenger) as well as help establish a self-sustaining space industry that could pay “millions, billions” in taxes.

(SPACE.com)

Red Whittaker, CEO and chief science officer of Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh, exhorted Obama to take note of the “little robotic landing missions in the pipeline” that could lead to mining water ice on the moon. Astrobotic Technology plans to launch a prospecting mission to drill for lunar ice in 2015 as part of its effort to win the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

“There are a lot of things that you could bet on for near-time success and fulfillment,” Whittaker said. “One part of your heritage might be to drill for ice at the pole and lead the world in that regard.”

Bob Richards, CEO of Moon Express Inc., “speaking as a true Canadian,” joked that Romney appeared to be from Mars and Obama from Venus. But Richards made a serious request for the president to support space entrepreneurs and the commercial space industry.

Moon Express, based in Mountain View, Calif., is another Google Lunar X Prize competitor. Both Moon Express and Astrobotic Technology have won NASA contracts worth millions of dollars to carry out lunar data-collecting missions during their landing or prospecting missions.

Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources Inc. in Bellevue, Wash., raised the question of whether human explorers should go to the asteroids, moon or Mars next. His answer: “All three.”

Planetary Resources made headlines in April with an ambitious plan to mine the mineral wealth of asteroids — a venture backed by Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron and billionaire investors such as Google co-founder Larry Page.

Still, Lewicki recalled the U.S. government’s legacy through NASA of “blazing a trail” and creating technologies and know-how that can be leveraged by others in the space agency’s wake.

“It’s important for us to have capability to do it, not because we’re headed to any particular destination,” Lewicki said. “That legacy is where government can and has led and can lead again.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Robbo-Man

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This article originally published at Space.com
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Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/09/13/space-mining-entrepreneurs-pitch-invisible-obama-and-romney/

Space Mining Entrepreneurs Pitch Invisible Obama and Romney

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Lunar Samples Support Giant Impact Theory

The most accepted hypothesis for the formation of the moon involves a giant collision between the Earth and another Mars-sized planetary body about 4.5 billion years ago. The debris that resulted from this impact coalesced into the moon. While this sounded like the most reasonable scenario and there were many clues suggesting an impact, we’ve never been able to detect any evidence of that other planetary body on the moon. Now, three lunar samples that were returned in the Apollo missions have now revealed traces of material that is believed to have come from that other planetary body, known as Theia. The results of the study were published in Science.

Though computer simulations had shown that the Giant Impact Hypothesis would result in a moon made up primarily from Theia’s material, all prior analyses had indicated that the moon was completely made up of material from Earth. However, a recent, more sensitive round of testing has shown that there are key differences between the moon and the Earth, which the researchers say supports the impact hypothesis.

Some are skeptical, and believe that the differences between the moon and Earth stem from changes in materials on Earth after the moon’s formation. The differences are also quite subtle, as they identified small differences in oxygen isotopes within the rock samples. As meteorites indicate that the solar system is riddled with things of completely different compositions, it almost doesn’t make sense that Theia, which is believed to have been the size of Mars, would only have such a minute difference.

However, it could be that Theia and Earth were formed in close proximity, and would therefore be made out of the same material. If that is true, it challenges the idea that planetary bodies have unique “fingerprints” that allow them to be easily identified. This concept is based on the idea that meteorites originating from Mars have a highly different composition, though we don’t have any samples from Mercury or Venus to confirm the composition of all planets in the inner solar system. 

Alternative hypotheses for the moon’s formation include that Theia was larger than Mars and closer to the size of Earth. At impact, the majority of the debris would have come from Earth. Another one states that a nuclear explosion deep below the surface ejected the material out, which then formed the moon.

While the preliminary results are fairly exciting, their implications are pretty staggering, which is why researchers need to be very cautious moving forward. More samples will need to be analyzed in order to confirm these findings. Ideally, future manned missions to the moon would collect samples below the surface that haven’t been weathered by solar wind and impacts from space debris. While manned lunar landings have been proposed by the space programs India, Japan, Europe, China, Iran and Russia, none of them have been funded as of yet. 

[Hat tip: Pallab Ghosh, BBC]

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/space/lunar-samples-support-giant-impact-theory

Lunar Samples Support Giant Impact Theory

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