Hey, welcome to sign stuff the production of our heart Radio I'm more a champ and today we're talking about the Artemis Moon Missions. That's the NASA program that's aiming to send humans back to the Moon. I'm going to talk to three scientists work on the program, and I'm going to ask them three questions. Why are we going back to the Moon, What kind of science are we hoping to get out of it, and what's the future
of moon exploration. Are we gonna set up camp there or build an observatory for looking at the stars or is it going to be a jumping off point for going to Mars. We're going to cover a lot about going to the Moon, So strap in and get ready to launch as we take another giant leap for humankind the new Artemis Moon Missions. Enjoy. Hey everyone, you might have seen in the news that we're going back to
the Moon. Just this week, NASA is scheduled to launch the Artemis two mission, which, for the first time in over fifty years, will send humans to go take a closer look at the Moon. Now, this one is not going to land on the Moon, as we'll explain later, there's a whole series of missions under the Artemis program, and this one is only scheduled to loop around the Moon.
It's like the Apollo missions back in the late nineteen sixties, you know, Apollo one, a Polo two, Apollo three, all the way up to Apollo eleven, which was the one that first landed on the Moon. And I say only going to loop around the Moon like it's easy. But clearly it's a huge deal that we're sending people back there. I mean, it's literally rocket science. So the big question for me was why are we doing this? It's super cool, but why now? And what are we hoping to get
out of it? To answer these questions, I was lucky enough to talk to three NASA scientists who all work on the Artemis program. The first one is doctor Jose Udalo. Well, thank you doctor Rudala for joining us.
Thank you Hodi here for having me. So my name is Hose Dalo and I serve in various capacities on the Artemis science team.
Can you tell us about what do you do for the Artemist mission.
So right now I'm on both the Artemis two operations team and the first Artemist Geology team. I'm helping with defining science objectives and also for executing those objectives during the mission.
So we went to the Moon in the late sixties seventies, and then there was a long period where we didn't seem to want to go to the Moon. What do you think has reawakened this interest in the Moon?
Oh, that's a great question. I think a couple things. So One, we've reevaluated our knowledge of the Moon in ways that have been enabled by use science technologies since the sixties. You know, we have new insights into things like water that we weren't able to make those insights back in the sixties. I think that's driven a lot of the renewed interest, especially in the polar areas of the Moon. We've got great new data sets from orbiters
that have flown around the Moon. Not just the US, but other nations have contributed to the wealth of remotely set data, and so now we have new eyes on the lunar surface. And I think that sort of generated lots of new questions and excitement. Oh and I think another part of it is sort of the pool of space explorers now is a little bit different than it was in the sixties. It is no longer just nation states and it's not the same nation states, you know.
So we have companies now that are able to launch and develop their own spacecraft for their own purposes, you know, some commercial, some scientific, and you know, we've got new competitors on the global scene. You know, China is the one everybody talks about. India is another big player in space that's talking about sending crew to the Moon and eventually to Mars. So I think the field is much wider open now than it was in the sixties, huh. And I see that as a good thing. I think
the more people go to the Moon, the better. I'll be cheering them all on, no matter which flag they were on their spacesuit.
Interesting part of it is looking back at the Moon and learning new things and going like, oh hey, I didn't know about this, Let's take another look at the moon. Absolutely, And the other part of it is sort of like other people are interested in now going to the Moon, so we should stay ahead a little bit.
Yeah, there's always a little bit of competitiveness in human nature, right, but I think if we can harness that to further the scientific and really deeply human ambitions that can be sort of brought out in a positive way. I think that'll be really fabulous.
That's great. More science is always good, Yeah, it's a unifier. More a space exploration is always exciting.
Absolutely.
What are some of the things we've learned about the Moon that we didn't know before.
Yeah.
Well, one of the big things has to do with the water on the moon.
Yes, there is water on the Moon. And if you remember from our last episode about asteroids, you'll know that water is hugely important or space travel. You can drink it, you can turn it into oxygen to breathe, you can make rocket fuel out of it, and you can even use it as radiation shielding when you're in space. But for a long time, according to or Udaldo, we didn't think the Moon had any water on it.
You know, we go back to the sixties, you know, the few of the Moon coming out of the Apollo samples was the Moon was very dry, which in some ways was surprising given our models for how the Moon formed. Why was this surprising, Well, you might imagine, you know, if you subscribe to the idea that the Moon and the Earth sort of formed close together.
Right.
The current hypothesis is that the early Earth was hit by a large object something the size of Mars, and the results of that collision, that leftover material formed the Moon.
And so you might.
Imagine that the Moon and the Earth should have some similarities, perhaps in the abundance of water, but if you look at the details of the geochemistry, that doesn't really fit,
or at least not as neatly as you might expect. But now we've got sort of new ways of analyzing these samples from Apollo that give us better insights, and so now we have this view that there's probably lots of water on the Moon, some of which was brought to the Moon by asteroids comets impacting, some of which might have been brought out from the interior of the Moon early on in the Moon's history by volcanoes, and some of that water might be delivered to the Moon today,
some in the form of little, tiny impacts, but a lot in the form of the solar wind.
What okay, when I rewind a little bit, you said that there's water coming to the Moon from the Sun.
Yeah, the solar wind. So the Sun's constantly sort of bombarding the lunar surface with particles protons, which, if you remember your chemistry, is basically a hydrogen nucleus and hydrogen plus oxygen, and there's plenty of it in the lunar surface, makes water least the building blocks for water.
Fascinating. I hadn't thought about it. It's like it's raining water almost from the Sun. Yeah, it's a interesting way to think about it. Yeah, or's training I guess hydrogen braining hydrogen that then gets converted to water on the Moon.
Yep. And our understanding of that story, which is so important for understanding the early history there at the Moon. That's really changed a lot since the sixties, and that's driving a lot of what we're doing at the Moon now.
That's right. Water is a big motivation for this new push to go back to the Moon. Basically, the scientists have figured out that the Moon is wetter than we thought. They reanalyzed the moon rock samples that Apollo brought back. They found water molecules they hadn't seen before. Also, the satellites we've put around the Moon since then have also seen hints of water and the moondust that's on the surface.
But the most tantalizing idea is that there could be huge amounts of water in the north and south poles of the Moon, and there's the possibility that there's water deposits on the poles, right, that's right.
What's really interesting about the poles of the Moon is that there are craters that are deep enough at the poles that have never seen sunlight in their interiors. If you are standing at the south pole of the Moon, the sun would be continuously low on the horizon, and that's because the Moon is essentially not tilted in the same way the Earth is relative to the Sun. Right, so the Earth is tilted at twenty three and a half degrees, that's why we have seasons. The Moon's not
like that. The Moon is essentially not tilted with respect to the Sun, and so the poles have this strange illumination condition where the sun is barely grazing the horizon. So you can imagine deep enough craters their interiors will never be illuminated, and that makes them very cold. Some of the coldest places that we know of and the whole Solar system, in fact, the known universe, are on the Moon. These shadowed areas, and these permanently shadowed craters
have temperatures that are close to absolute zero. It's kind of like in your freezer, right, you have like ice that builds up on the walls of your freezer. That's why you get to frost your refrigerator right now.
And then uh huh. Any water that is floating around and eventually gets the poles will suddenly freeze into.
Spots exactly exactly. So these are cold traps. And so the idea is that some of these craters might have ancient ice, you know that maybe it was delivered early on in the Moon's history by impacts or by volcanoes. So there's a whole history there to understand as well.
Wow, there could be a whole ice skating rinks in the poles of the Moon.
Potentially that would be a great thing, wouldn't it. Right, you have like the Winter Olympics on the Moon.
Someday they could do not a triple LUTs, but like a quint triple lutz exactly.
I'm sure curling on the Moon would be really popular too.
Oh even slower, yeah, exactly, even less exciting perhaps. Yeah.
The thing with the ice though, we're not sure what form it has, so it could be you know, sheets of that are interlayered with the lunar soil. It could be just ice disseminated throughout the soil, kind of like it is in perma frost here on Earth. It could be veins. We're not sure what format has. That's one of the things we'll find out, hopefully when we have astronauts and robots on the Moon in the South Pole in the coming years.
Yes, you heard that right. There aren't going to be people and robots and maybe also cars and a moon base on the Moon in the coming years. There's even plans for a moon delivery service. We'll get to that later in the program. But when we come back, we're going to talk to one of the chief scientists of the Artemist mission who's going to step us through the
big picture here. Why exactly are we setting up camp on the Moon and what do we hope to gain by actually being there, I mean, besides potentially curling and ice skating in the South Pole. So chill out and stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about NASA's Artemis program and why we're going
back to the Moon. We just talked about why there's a renewed interest in going back there, and now we're going to talk about what science we're hoping to get out of revisiting our closest neighbor to give us an overview. I talked to doctor Renee Weber, one of the chief scientists who works on the mission. So here's my conversation with doctor Weber. Well, thank you, doctor Weber for joining us.
Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
Can you please tell us what you do? Yeah.
I work for NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center, where I am the chief scientist.
It's like you have a tribe of scientist there and you're the chief.
Yeah. And I'm also a member of the Artemis Internal Science Team, and we're a team of lunar scientists who are helping the agency to define the science objectives and activities that astronauts will do when we return to the Moon.
Amazing. Well, today we're trying to learn what the Artemist missions are all about. How would you describe the overall objective of the Artemist missions? What's the big picture? Plant?
Yeah, So you know, NASA's mission as an agency is to explore the unknown, to go places that we haven't gone before, to make new discoveries, to share those discoveries with the world, to inspire people and you know, the Moon is sort of a distant frontier and it really touches on that exploration craving that I guess all humans have, and specifically to go to the Moon. You can sort
of think about three big camps of science. The first is actually studying the Moon itself, and the second is using the Moon as a platform to explore other areas.
Wow.
And the third is doing science that helps us understand how to live and work in that environment, so like a Moon base, and even going farther forward than that, thinking about sending humans to Mars. So understanding how to live and work in space is really really important when you think about expanding that human frontier.
Wow. Oh that's amazing. I had I heard it broken down like that. Can we go through them one by one? Yeah? Okay, So the first one you said was to understand the Moon better.
Yeah, just to learn about the Moon, how it formed and evolved over time, and in that sense, we can sort of use the Moon as a laboratory for understanding how all planets form and evolve over time.
Okay, So the first overall size goal of the Artemis program is to understand more about the Moon, not just about the water on it, like we talked about in the last segment, but also it's geology. This is important because, as it turns out, the Moon has older rocks than the Earth. Even though the Moon and the Earth formed at the same time, the Earth is still hot and so the rocks keep melting and churning and recycling between
the crust and the inside of the Earth. But the Moon cooled off faster because it's smaller, and so it's rocks frose in place a long time ago, which lets us look further back in time.
Understanding the composition of the materials on the Moon is another way that we can understand planetary processes and how planetary surfaces form and evolve. And that's a big thing that we want astronauts to do when they go to the Moon. We want them to pick up rocks and bring them back so that we can analyze the men laboratories on Earth.
And here's another cool thing about understanding the geology of moon rocks. We want to know if we can build things with them.
And it's also important for a field of science called in schi resource utilization, which is basically figuring out how to live using the materials that you have where you are, And so can we use the soil on the Moon to create concrete? Can we build structures with it? Can we build roads? Can we build landing pads? Can we you know, use it to shield us against radiation? So those are all things that we would want to go and do geology to understand those.
Oh that's fascinating. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Can you make roads and houses from moon rocks? Yeah?
Yeah, there are actually some programs here at Marshall looking at a process which is essentially three D printing using lunar materials.
Wow, that would be the ultimate flex. It's like, not only might living in a three D printed house, it's on the Moon. Okay. So that's signs goal number one, which is doing signs about the Moon. It's water, it's rocks, it's history signs. Goals number two and number three are even cooler. Number two is to use the Moon as a testing ground for learning how to live in another planet.
The science of using the Moon as a platform is particularly interesting because the Moon's environment is so unique compared to Earth, and it's also what makes it a challenge to be there. Yeah, so there's no atmosphere on the Moon, So figuring out how to build a suit that will sustain you for short visits, all the way up to how do you build a habitat that will sustain you for long visits, and then how do we grow plants? And sort of like the practical things having to do
with just being there. It's just trying to understand the lunar environment basically what hazards are there. There are moonquakes really yeah, they're not the same as earthquakes. They don't occur for the same reasons, but they do occur, and so understanding how, why, when, how often, how big you know, could a moonquake knock a building down for example? Those are questions that we need to answer. The radiation environment
is another big one. The surface of the Moon is just getting blasted with that all the time, and so it is a kind of more dangerous environment if you're going there to spend a long time, and so if you want to build a habitat, it needs to be able to protect you from that radiation.
So I think you're saying that this is sort of like a practice run to going to Mars or to going to other planets. Just like how do we study an environment and learn to live there.
Right. Yeah, Like I said, it's more about testing the systems and the technologies than it is for being a physical waypoint. So I don't think, at least in the near term, we're not going to be launching off from the Moon to go to Mars. We're going to launch from Earth to go to Mars. But understanding the space environment and building systems that are robust to the space environment is something that we can apply to other planets.
Okay, And the last scientific goal of the Artemis missions is so basically turned the Moon into a really cool science lab.
So the science objectives, the last one was about taking advantage of the unique lunar environment to do science that we can't do on Earth. And so we can do a lot of really cool material science research, So things like growing crystals or creating microfilament, those types of materials behave much differently in microgravity than they do in Earth gravity.
The other ones are growing plants or any kind of biological experiment, which could include looking at human cells and how they react to the lunar environment, doing things that are beneficial for human health.
I see.
And then also okay, if you're in an exploration atmosphere, right, it's likely going to be different than just the ambient Earth atmosphere, and materials can behave differently in those environments. So understanding the flammability of materials or how how plastics can degrade over time, those are going to be different on the Moon than they're going to be on Earth.
REALI, is there any special consideration that you have to take into account for when doing experiments on the Moon?
Yeah, so the experiments themselves, you know, the hardware or whatever the instrument is needs to be designed with dust in mind. So you're walking around on the Moon, You're going to get some dust on you. It's inevitable. And so you know, they're looking at different ways of how can we get the dust off of us before we go back inside our fancy spaceship that we want to keep clean.
A simple floor MAT's not going to cut it. Nope, it's like particle number one, wipe your feet before you enter the lunar capsule. Yes, So those are the main scientific goals of going back to the Moon, and they are pretty ambitious, which brings us to the next big question, what is all of this going to look like in the future? Are we really going to set up moon bases and live there. How do you bring stuff there and back? And more importantly, can you still get Amazon
delivery on the Moon? Well, believe it or not, NASA actually has a plan for that. When we come back, we'll talk about all of these things. So stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking to scientists who work on the new Artemis program to take astronauts back to the Moon. The last time you sent people there was in the Apollo missions in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. Now you might be wondering what are we doing differently this time, and what's the
long term plan for this? Are we actually going to set up camp at the Moon? To step us through these questions, I talked to doctor Marie Henderson, one of the deputy lunar science leads for Artemis too. Thank you, doctor Henderson for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm doctor Marie Henderson. I am a planetary scientist who specializes in lunar science and lunar volcanology, and I work at NASA Goddard Sweet Flight Center and also the University of Maryland, Baltimore County amazing.
So there's no word for someone who just studies the moon.
So there's so many different ways to say the moon. So you could be a lunar geologist, there could be someone who's a lunar spectroscopist. We sort of keep it sort of broad.
I see, So there's many flavors of lunatics.
Yes, Benny, all right, Well, I guess to start us off, what's different about how we're going to the Moon this time, Like, why can't we just blow off the cob webs from the Apollo missions, you know, dust of off and do again.
Yeah, you know, technology has changed significantly since the Apollo. The computing power during the Apollo program. I've heard inside the lunar module is less than what's in our cell phone. And so there's a lot of things that we're able to expand upon and also change as we go forward. And so it's not just brushing the dust off, but we're also creating off lan for going back to the Moon, because we're not just hoping to go for one off missions.
We are also hoping to go and potentially stay for longer periods of time, And along with that, science is also playing a much larger role in this round of
going back to the Moon. During the Apollo program, it was focused on getting humans onto the surface of the Moon, and over the past fifty years, lunar science has really expanded with our more detailed time to study it, and so we are going to be able to go to much more interesting areas of the Moon and places that are also more difficult to land.
We're going to go to different places in the Moon. Mm hm oh.
Yeah.
So during the Apollo most of where we landed were equatorial regions, so they were well lit, good for communication. And as we've been able to expand our knowledge, that allows us to go somewhere, you know, to the South Pole the Moon that has a more extreme lighting conditions and also a very different terrain.
Oh wow. Is there a bucket list of places to visit for the Moon.
I think if you talk to every lunar signed as, they have their own bucket list.
Yeah.
Right now, for the first landed missions, it's been narrowed down to I think it's like thirteen or fourteen landing regions in the South Pole, and within that there are still many different sites available.
Oh wow, and you mention we're going to land on the far side of the Moon also, Oh no.
Just the South Pole, okay for now, but eventually it would be amazing to land on the far side of the Moon.
I see. There's no Pink Floyd concert plan for the other.
Side of the Moon, unfortunately not.
And you said there's been a lot of obviously changes in technology since the Apollo mission. What is all this technology going to give us this time we're out.
Yeah, so we're going to be able to start to really choreograph a lot of different scientific operations and also thinking about how we communicate, being able to potentially send images back from you know, multiple cameras on the lunar surface, so like different ways to be able to send back
data in real time. And we see those videos that are sort of grainy from the Apollo program, and that's one of the things we're really going to be able to expand on as we continue to Artemiss is taking the entire world with us as we go back to the Moon.
Oh that's awesome. Are we going to be able to like face time with the astronauts kind of the idea?
I hope.
So now, according to doctor Henderson, these upgrades in how we can talk to the astronauts as they go to the Moon is important because even though we have high definition cameras, there's nothing quite like what a person can see.
A lot of their training goes into telling us what they are seeing. So they'll be hooked up to a computer sort of like we both die right now, and making a recording of what they are seeing. And even though we have had orbiters around the Moon for a long time, the human eyeballs connected to a human brain is a really impressive system and it can pick up different nuances that not always orbiters can pick up. And so we're looking for those, like differences in color across
the surface. How do surfaces change, especially with changing lighting conditions. That's something we need a human to do.
Oh wow, Like it helps to be there, I know it really does.
I'm very jealous but also very.
Exciting for them. And so what will you be doing in mission control? You'll be wearing the headphones, you'll be in front of the screen. What's your world there?
So I'm actually one of the science leaves and also the Science Evaluation room, and so this is the room where we're going to be building the plan for what the astronauts will be looking at during this mission and then evaluating the data that comes down amazing.
That sounds super exciting. Is that a high pressure situation or are you.
We've been training a lot, so we've gone and helped prepare the crew for what they're going to see and how they're going to describe it.
It's the most important job to remind them to hit the record button.
That is definitely. They know the importance of how their words may tell us more things than they may even realize they're telling us. And so every little details something they may describe could actually be that sort of epiphany or that light bulb moment that could really help us. And so we're really excited to hear their perspectives and the fact that there are multiple sets of eyes looking at the Moon.
Wow, that's fascinating. And I heard also that part of the Artemis program is to establish kind of a long term presence on the Moon. Can you tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, So the goal is to continue to potentially build a Moon base and sort of the longer that you can stay and learn in a space environment, it helps us to prepare to go explore other places in our Solar system.
And this is where we get to the future of the artemis missions as it happens. Right as we were making this episode, NASA made a big announcement about what the long term goals are. Here's how doctor Rutalo describes it.
Actually, just in the last couple of hours, there's a big thing happening Washington, d C. Today where the NASA administrator is outlining sort of the vision for the Artemist program, and one of the ambitions is to land landers at the Moon at a monthly cadence in the next few years. Wow, that blows me away.
That's super exciting, Like everyone will be sending rockets and landers.
And exactly you know, if that pans out, we'll have you know, monthly delivery of robots with science instruments to the Moon. That's just fantastic.
That's incredible. And I read the it's going to be partially private, Like it's not just NASA, it's maybe private contractors making these landers and robots. It is.
That's something that's quite different with space exploration today compared to you know, back in the Apollo era. Private companies now are really important players, and NASA is seeing that as a benefit. You know, we've got all these companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX and there's others that are going to be providing launch and landing services, you know. So it's almost like you know, buying like a service to do like a lunar delivery. NASA has this program
called CLIPS Commercial Lunar Payloads Services. So this is a program where NASA is essentially buying lander services from private companies. So these companies build their own landers, they secure sort of a launch on a rocket, you know, SpaceX or Blue Origin or what have you, and those landers will
carry payloads to the Moon. And those payloads could include NASA instruments, but these landers could be carrying other stuff, you know, for company, some company wants to test some technology on the lunar surface and they can sort of buy room on that lander to send their technology.
I see, like established kind of infrastructure.
Yes, infrastructure, and just sort of economic motivations for doing this, beyond science and beyond the other motivations that have taken us as far as we are now.
So like if you're on the Moon, you can go on Amazon dot com and order I don't know what would you need on the.
Moon, Oh, stuff that you can't find in seech you. Yeah, I mean it would not surprise me that someday we'll have Amazon deliveries on the lunar surface.
Wow, that's pretty I guess that's kind of the dream, right, absolutely.
Yeah, that's what a sustained lunar presence I think will look like.
And that's kind of the dream of the Artemis program to make going to the Moon as easy and common as calling an Uber or scheduling an Amazon delivery, and so we can do awesome signs about how the Earth wares and what it takes to live in space and other planets. Okay, I just had one more question for our scientists, which was would they go to the moon? Okay, last question. Doctor. If NASA said we need you to go to the Moon tomorrow and live there, would you go oh?
Absolutely and heartbeat.
Absolutely okay, yeah, no second thought, no, no second thought, you're going I would go, Yeah, but this is to move to the Moon and live there. I would you would do it? I would yeah, amazing. What would you bring with you?
Oh? Well, I'm a geologist, so I would probably bring my rock hammer along. I'm sure there's some of those beautiful vistas that haven't been seen yet and that's because they're on the Moon, and I'd love to be able to see that firsthand.
If NASA called you today and said, doctor Weber, we need you to be on the next slide out to the Moon, would you go.
I don't think so. I really like Earth. Earth is my favorite planet. But you know, one of the visions that I've had in my head ever since I was a kid was making Star Trek be real, making there be people living and working in space.
Yeah, and you know.
I'm happy to help enable that from the comfort and safety of our home planet.
Last question, So in the movie Hell Mary, they asked scientists working on the mission at the last minute to join the mission. Doctor Henderson, if NASA said right now we needed to go to the Moon on the next rocket, would you go, Oh?
Absolutely, I would be so ready. Just drab me in, put me in, coach. I'm here.
What would it mean to you if to go and see the Moon closer with your own eyes?
It would just it takes it out of your own head. It's almost like every single night you look up at the Moon and you see it. And I've spent so much in my life thinking about the Moon, but to actually have it turned from something that I I've only seen really in like two dimensions to actually something to be a part of in like a three dimensional space. It would just blow my mind and I would probably have eight thousand more questions in my head than I
already have right now. And you can leave me there for a while because I've got a lot of The moon was always the goal for me, and I'm so fortunate to be a part of the generation that gets to do this again.
Oh that's amazing. Hey. The launch for the Artemis two mission scheduled for this week, and it's programmed to be live streamed on NASA TV and several other platforms like Netflix in Amazon Prime, so be sure to check it out. A big thanks to the scientist we spoke to today and to NASA for helping make it happen. Thanks for joining us. See you next time you've been listening to
science stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me Or hitch Ham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Ksey Pegram and you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your
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