Ken Murphy / 1:05 am August 30th, 2011

Howdy everyone!

Just taking a break here from various projects to point out some consumer culture items helping to set a Moon mood this week.

First up, is Apollo 18. Billed as “found footage” from a secret government mission to the Moon in 1974, it opens Friday around the country:

Looks like I’ll be at the theater this weekend for the first time in ages. As far as ‘found footage’ movies go, I did rather enjoy Troll Hunter, and Cloverfield is still fun…

Fresh out is a new sci-fi novel from Larry Niven & Steven Barnes that is set on the Moon. The year is 2085 and humanity is spreading into the Solar system. On the Moon, Heinlein Crater has been given over to the creation of a gaming environment for the creation of the ultimate live-action role-playing (LARP) adventure ever broadcast.

For those unfamiliar with LARPing, it’s role-playing gaming in a ‘real-world’ (i.e. non-virtual) setting. We’ve come a long way from Mazes & Monsters, and while role-playing still carries a strong geek factor, it is more accepted than it used to be. Still, we’re not as far along as ‘Dream Park‘ (an earlier novel in this series) or ‘Futureworld‘. Holography is still not here in the form everyone wants (although I’d rather use holography for useful things like 3D air traffic control before entertainment), and RPGing still isn’t a spectator sport. FPS shooters seem to be though; more on that anon.

I’m about halfway through the book for an upcoming review, so stay tuned for that in the not-too-distant future.

Also forthcoming is another EVA Interview. Not here at OotC, unfortunately, but rather in the new magazine that the folks over at NASAWatch/SpaceRef are putting together, Space Quarterly. The first issue is scheduled for release on September 1st, and therein you will find her interview with Jeff Greason. Jeff is emerging as a strong spokesperson for the commercial development of cislunar space, couched in terms of ultimately settling off-world in new colonies. Cislunar space is our sandbox for learning how to do things further out. It’s a new marketplace awaiting exploitation, something I hope is highlighted in one of the articles in the first issue: “The Philosophy of Lunar Commercialization and Economic Development”.

Speaking of commercial product, if you haven’t been to your local Hallmark store in a while, you might want to stop in and grab a “The Sky’s the Limit” Snoopy-on-the-Moon figure. Hallmark has been dribbling out a number of astronaut Snoopy items over the last few years, from holiday tree ornaments to figurines to plush toys (a number of which mysteriously turned up in the annual NSS of North Texas Santa Space Toy Drive collection…). I’ve been a big fan of astronaut Snoopy for a while, enough so that when I was interning at Boeing in Huntington Beach during my ISU studies I made a field trip to the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park specifically to look for whatever astronaut Snoopy stuff I could find. This was of course the precursor to the Astronaut Snoopy Medal still given out to Yuri’s Night volunteers, although the Snoopy isn’t dancing anymore, and is in a white outfit, not blue. More akin to the Silver Snoopy Award given out to team members that went above-and-beyond to assure mission success in the Shuttle program. I was pleased to see a number of Yuri’s Night folks wearing their medals at the party I threw on behalf of The Moon Society at this year’s ISDC in Huntsville.

Way on the other end of the wholesomeness spectrum. I say way, way over there well removed from anything approaching wholesome family entertainment with strong christian overtones (shout out to Robot Chicken), is a new first-person-shooter add-on pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops. Your friendly Lunar Librarian doesn’t normally play FPS games, being more of a Civ-type game player where one tries to build an enduring civilization, one of strong culture and secure borders. But if you’re into shoot-’em-ups (and who isn’t every now and then?), you might want to check out this latest horror. There have been Werewolves on the Moon. There have been Vampires on the Moon. There have been Mummies on the Moon. (I know this because they’re all in the ‘Comics in Space’ art show I have hanging at Frontiers of Flight Museum - you should definitely check it out) Now, it is time for…

Zombies on the Moon!

What can I say - new physics to play with, as when the projectile gun launches the wielder into the air (so to speak). Hopefully the PC version will be on a CD so I can add a physical copy to the Lunar Library.

And since we’re on the topic of Nazi’s on the Moon, there’s an updated trailer from Iron Sky, the forthcoming independent movie currently scheduled to hit theatres on April 4th, 2012.

Speaking of Lunar Library, and art shows, and scary things…as I noted previously I’ve already started on the art show for next year’s Moon Day on July 21st. My medium will be space-themed LP covers. My initial goal is to have 150 LP covers. Each will be mounted in a frame. Each column will have 5 frames, meaning 30 columns in all. Groupings of columns will allow for the telling of stories, but the general progression will be early days, astronauts and rockets and satellites (cislunar space), our Moon, the planets, and our Cosmos. Willie Nelson gets the final frame with ‘Stardust’.

Don’t think you can guess the covers, though. My DITC (that’s Diggin’ In The Crates) is turning up some amazingly unusual items. I promised scary things, and here from the satellites section of the show is one that I find particularly unsettling, even more so than zombies, like something from a SPECTRE crime boss line-up. Whoever said there was no money to be made in space? See if you can guess the year of the LP from the cut of his suit…

Ken Murphy / 6:39 pm August 14th, 2011

[Note: This review is reprinted from the May 2011 issue of Moon Miner’s Manifesto]

“Blogging the Moon” by Paul D. Spudis. Published in 2011 by Apogee Prime, it weighs in at 328 pages, plus a DVD of his talk “Luna Nova” and a slideshow of his personal Moon quest over the past three decades. Well edited, with the only noted errors in the included commentary.

It might seem counterintuitive to publish a print book of web content, but it’s not new in the space community. The first notable example of web content collected into book form would likely have to be the PERMANENT book, drawn from the www.permanent.com website which addresses Projects to Employ the Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near-Earth, Near-Term. Which sounds an awful lot like what Dr. Spudis is talking about.

The book opens with a brief preface describing how the author came to have a blog at Air & Space Magazine online entitled The Once & Future Moon, which name is taken from his 1996 book, its title an homage to the T.H. White book that all future leaders should read as a young lad. As so often happens with blogging of substance, the frequency of the blog posts may not have been what management expected, the posts themselves were usually worthy of their episodic (rather than periodic) nature. (Paul has admitted that blogging is a lot more involved than he had anticipated. Amen to that)

The original offer was to have Dr. Spudis “live-blog” the launch of India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe, which carried Dr. Spudis’ Mini-SAR instrument to the Moon, recounted here as “India Aims for the Moon”. The story continues with “Hitting a Bull’s-Eye on the Moon”, where he recounts the thoroughly modern story of sitting in his hotel room at 4am, having just gotten images from Chandrayaan’s Moon Impact Probe (MIP) that evening, and live-streaming the upcoming Endeavour launch and seeing a full Moon slowly rising above the horizon in the Florida twilight, from Bangalore. This is also the first post to include the article’s comments.

Readers want constant novelty (for free!) and so there is a constant pressure on bloggers to generate new posts to try to get the traffic numbers up. This leads to Dr. Spudis posting on a variety of topics, in many cases policy-related, but also regarding legal issues, Lunar water, myriad reports on space issues, and a host of other things, for a total of 65 chapters dating from October 21st, 2008 to July 23rd, 2010.

Over that timeframe, NASA “bombed” the Moon with LCROSS, and the President released a new prescription for NASA, one involving less work on a custom new launch vehicle system (that was apparently too expensive to actually do anything with once built) and more work on moving the technologies useful for doing things in space, like fuel depots, rendezvous & docking, on-orbit assembly, radiation shielding, many-restart rocket motors, and so on. Which technologies can be used by the private sector to serve not only their own ends, but also those of NASA.

Dr. Spudis doesn’t quite see it that way, and spends much of the latter part of the book detailing his views on the shortcomings of the President’s directions to NASA. His argument seems to boil down to “NASA needs to have a specific target and direction before they can achieve great things”. The danger therein, however, is that NASA’s results tend to be optimized to that particular target/direction, with little cross-adaptability to any other application in space activities.

Including the comments that people leave at the blog expands the context of each post to that of a dialogue with both the author and other commenters. In some instances this aids in understanding each post, in others the thread can be drawn astray from Dr. Spudis’ intent, and has to be shepherded back on topic. Even these diversions, though, often have their own value.

Overall, the book is an interesting foray from Lunar science in India, to rocket design in the halls of Congress. It’s readily accessible to the layman, but given Dr. Spudis’ position in the forefront of Lunar science it also offers numerous insights on the advantages of the Moon for more informed readers. The book format allows for easier flipping back and forth between related blog posts, as well as the ability to jot notes in the margin to capture important points. I’ll have to be sure to get the Paul to sign the review copy in the Lunar Library at the next ISDC, where he is slated to receive the University of Luna award from The Moon Society.

A solid work in every way, this one gets a Full Moon rating.

Ken Murphy / 12:52 am August 9th, 2011

Some interesting Lunar news out this last week, about some folks out in California who came up with a computer model that implied a second Moon at some point in the distant past. It was given surprisingly broad coverage in the media:

·Nature
·Space.com
·ABC Science
·Discovery News
·MSNBC
·USA Today

Here’s the abstract:

“The most striking geological feature of the Moon is the terrain and elevation dichotomy between the hemispheres: the nearside is low and flat, dominated by volcanic maria, whereas the farside is mountainous and deeply cratered. Associated with this geological dichotomy is a compositional and thermal variation, with the nearside Procellarum KREEP (potassium/rare-earth element/phosphorus) Terrane and environs interpreted as having thin, compositionally evolved crust in comparison with the massive feldspathic highlands. The lunar dichotomy may have been caused by internal effects (for example spatial variations in tidal heating, asymmetric convective processes or asymmetric crystallization of the magma ocean) or external effects (such as the event that formed the South Pole/Aitken basin or asymmetric cratering). Here we consider its origin as a late carapace added by the accretion of a companion moon.

Companion moons are a common outcome of simulations of Moon formation from a protolunar disk resulting from a giant impact, and although most coplanar configurations are unstable, a ~1,200-km-diameter moon located at one of the Trojan points could be dynamically stable for tens of millions of years after the giant impact*. Most of the Moon’s magma ocean would solidify on this timescale, whereas the companion moon would evolve more quickly into a crust and a solid mantle derived from similar disk material, and would presumably have little or no core. Its likely fate would be to collide with the Moon at ~2–3 km/s, well below the speed of sound in silicates. According to our simulations, a large moon/Moon size ratio (~0.3) and a subsonic impact velocity lead to an accretionary pile rather than a crater, contributing a hemispheric layer of extent and thickness consistent with the dimensions of the farside highlands and in agreement with the degree-two crustal thickness profile. The collision furthermore displaces the KREEP-rich layer to the opposite hemisphere, explaining the observed concentration.”

Seems fairly straightforward, but there are some elements in the story that just don’t add up for me. For full disclosure I am not a Lunar scientist. We aren’t minting them anymore. There’s no school you can go to right now in the U.S. that offers a degree in Lunar science. Planetary Geology is usually your closest option. However, I have read through a fair chunk of the non-fiction section of the Lunar Library, and you can find reviews of many of them in the Book Reviews menu option over on the left.

So my questions are sincere, and not from ignorance. I do want to point out that there is a sharp elevation dichotomy, as they say. Here’s a video of LRO data:

And here is a scan of a postcard I got from the JAXA folks at an LPSC a couple of years ago. You can note that it is not quite as sensitive elevation-wise as LRO in the Mare Orientale region.

The one on the bottom is a gravity map, which highlights that while the far side has generally higher elevations, that doesn’t translate much to heavier when compared with those mascons on the near side.

One thing to be very careful of here is the Aitken Basin. It’s not just a big blue-purple bruise on the far side, it is an enormous chunk that has been taken out of the rear end of the Moon. The movie above is a bit deceiving, as the data is draped onto a sphere, just like you would see in a classroom. If you want to see what the Moon -really- looks like, feed the elevation data into a 3D printer and take a look at the result. Looking at the traditional near side it looks fine, round even. But then turn it sideways. It’ll blow your mind. Shout out to the JAXA kids that blew my mind at LPSC.

So the basic premise is that the reason there is more green-green, yellow and red on the far side as compared with the near side is because, when the Big Splat of Theia hitting the Earth and sloshing off a whole bunch of material into orbit happened, that material coalesced into not one but two large orbiting bodies. Eventually, the second, smaller moon started drifting into the Moon’s gravity well, smacked it at a non-cosmic velocity, and splashed itself on the Lunar far side. And so the far side is higher than the near side.

For more full disclosure purposes, I put very little faith in computer models. Just because I work in the financial industry doesn’t mean I don’t work with models. Budget projections are but one example. Sensitization of financial results another. Value at Risk (VaR) I laughed at when it was introduced, and had to explain to my bosses why it was nonsense. I’m well aware of the limitations of models, as well as their (limited) value.

The first question I have I asterisked in the abstract: “How does a large object stay stable at an Earth-Moon Lagrange point for tens of millions of years when you’ve got the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn et al tugging at and perturbing it?”

The reference in the abstract is to Cuk, M & Gladman, B.J. The fate of primordial lunar Trojans. Icarus 199.2, 237-244 (2009).

I read through the article, and get their point, although it quickly devolves into mathematical tetrapyloctomy. In essence, when the Moon and moon were much closer, the differences in the gravitational “warps” of space caused by the large bodies (which we know in our simple system as the Lagrangian points after the guy who worked out the mathematics) would have been such that a fair amount of material could have accumulated at the L-4 and L-5 points until the Moon reached a certain distance from the Earth, the resonance of the orbit shifts, and all of a sudden the mathematical models start going apeshit, leading to harmonic instabilities that pitch the moon on its course with destiny and our Moon. They do have a good point - 4.0Bn years ago the Moon would have been a lot closer to the Earth, and orbital resonance is a subtle but important part of orbital mechanics.

Interestingly, the paper cited seems to be arguing that any large moon could have broken apart on its way in, providing the large near-side impacts attributed to the “Great Cataclysm” of impacts that formed the nearside basins nigh on 3.9 billion years or so ago. The thinking there is that since there hasn’t been much evidence of the “Great Cataclysm” much of anywhere else in the rest of the Solar system, at least based on current data, and the impactors that created the great basins must have originated near Earth.

Which brings me to my second question - what is the effect of the transition of the second moon through the Moon’s Roche limit? I’m rather disappointed that none of the science articles seemed to address that question.

The Roche limit is the distance from a large body at which the inverse square law of gravity starts to have a significant effect on another large body approaching the first. The second body is experiencing so much different gravity between the near point and farthest point that it starts getting pulled apart. It’s the same basic thing as you getting pulled into spaghetti as you fall into a black hole, ‘cept on a planetary scale. If the body is as big and moving as slowly as they indicate, I guesstimate that it would have spent about eight minutes or so getting taffy-ed transitioning that Roche limit.

My third question has to do with the model. What was the level of granularity of the second Moon? What were the perturbatory inputs other than the Earth and Sun? There are so many things I would have to know about the model before I could put any small amount of faith in its output. And frankly, I don’t feel like paying the $32 for the paper to find out.

So color me as skeptical of the claim of a second early moon. There’s just too many pieces that don’t feel right for me to lend it much credence. My view may change if I ever do get to read the article. I anticipate a trip to Half-Price Books in a few months should prove fruitful, so I’ll let you know if I change my mind.

Which re-minds me, we do have a second moon, called Cruithne, that is currently on a funky potato chip/horseshoe orbit and so doesn’t visit much (and is why some folks deride it as not even a moon). Here’s a cool picture of our second sister and her wacky orbit: