silverjacket writes: A feature for The New Yorker describes a plan to use robots to mine lunar materials and build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon that will help answer questions about the early universe. An excerpt from the story: he dream of a lunar telescope dates to the nineteen-sixties. The moon has the advantage of being hundreds of thousands of miles away from earthly electronics; on the far side of the moon, in particular, there's virtually no noise from human technology or the Earth's magnetosphere. After the Apollo landings, however, interest in the moon waned. Jack Burns, an astrophysicist who is now at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been advocating for a moon-based telescope since 1984. "I never, never would have guessed that it would take this long," he told me. "I just won't accept no for an answer." Today, Burns is the chief scientist of FarView, as well as the primary investigator of a sort of mini-FarView: FARSIDE, which would have one or two hundred antennas instead of a hundred thousand. If FarView is built, it would be able to detect some of the oldest light in existence. The universe began 13.8 billion years ago as a dense, fast-expanding soup of matter and energy; around three hundred and eighty thousand years later, it had cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to hold together. After that came the Cosmic Dark Ages: millions of years without stars or galaxies, a period we know very little about. But hydrogen occasionally releases light with a wavelength of twenty-one centimetres -- radio waves. Some of that light is still around. Because twenty-one-centimetre radiation is stretched by the steady expansion of the universe -- it's now tens to hundreds of metres long -- scientists can figure out how old it is, and how far away. (The longer the wavelength, the older the light and the more distant its source.) This means that if scientists can build a radio telescope on the moon, they will be able to create a three-dimensional picture of the early universe.

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A small asteroid, 2024 PT5, will temporarily become a mini-moon for Earth, orbiting in a horseshoe shape from September 29 to November 25, 2024. CBS News reports: Researchers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, an asteroid monitoring system funded by NASA, spotted the asteroid using an instrument in Sutherland, South Africa and labeled it 2024 PT5. Scientists from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid have tracked the asteroid's orbit for 21 days and determined its future path. 2024 PT5 is from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which orbits the sun, according to their study published in Research Notes of the AAs. But Earth's gravitational pull will draw 2024 PT5 towards it and, much like our moon, it will orbit our planet -- but only for 56.6 days. 2024 PT5, which is larger than some of the other mini-moons, will also return to Earth's orbit -- in 2055. [...] The study's lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com the mini-moon will be too small to see with amateur telescopes or binoculars but professional astronomers with stronger tools will be able to spot it.

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Chinese scientists have developed a new method to produce significant quantities of water from lunar soil brought back by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The "brand-new method" involves heating moon minerals containing hydrogen to generate water vapor, which could be crucial for future lunar research stations and space exploration. Reuters reports: "After three years of in-depth research and repeated verification, a brand-new method of using lunar soil to produce large amounts of water was discovered, which is expected to provide important design basis for the construction of future lunar scientific research stations and space stations," said CCTV. The discovery could have important implications for China's decades-long project of building a permanent lunar outpost amid a U.S.-China race to find and mine the moon's resources. Using the new method, one tonne of lunar soil will be able to produce about 51-76 kg of water, equivalent to more than a hundred 500ml bottles of water, or the daily drinking water consumption of 50 people, the state broadcaster said. China hopes that recent and future lunar expeditions will set the foundations to build the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), an initiative it is co-leading with Russia.

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Ars Technica's John Timmer reports: [T]he International Astronomical Union has a resolution that calls for a "Lunar Celestial Reference System" and "Lunar Coordinate Time" to handle things there. On Monday, two researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology, Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, did the math to show how this might work. [...] Ashby and Patla worked on developing a system where anything can be calculated in reference to the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system. Or, as they put it in the paper, their mathematical system "enables us to compare clock rates on the Moon and cislunar Lagrange points with respect to clocks on Earth by using a metric appropriate for a locally freely falling frame such as the center of mass of the Earth-Moon system in the Sun's gravitational field." What does this look like? Well, a lot of deriving equations. The paper's body has 55 of them, and there are another 67 in the appendices. So, a lot of the paper ends up looking like this. Things get complicated because there are so many factors to consider. There are tidal effects from the Sun and other planets. Anything on the surface of the Earth or Moon is moving due to rotation; other objects are moving while in orbit. The gravitational influence on time will depend on where an object is located. So, there's a lot to keep track of. Ashby and Patla don't have to take everything into account in all circumstances. Some of these factors are so small they'll only be detectable with an extremely high-precision clock. Others tend to cancel each other out. Still, using their system, they're able to calculate that an object near the surface of the Moon will pick up an extra 56 microseconds every day, which is a problem in situations where we may be relying on measuring time with nanosecond precision. And the researchers say that their approach, while focused on the Earth/Moon system, is still generalizable. Which means that it should be possible to modify it and create a frame of reference that would work on both Earth and anywhere else in the Solar System. Which, given the pace at which we've sent things beyond low-Earth orbit, is probably a healthy amount of future-proofing. The findings have been published in the Astronomical Journal. A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) press release announcing the work can be found here.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Observer: Thousands of scientists have protested to the US Congress over the "unprecedented and indefensible" decision by Nasa to cancel its Viper lunar rover mission. In an open letter to Capitol Hill, they have denounced the move, which was revealed last month, and heavily criticised the space agency over a decision that has shocked astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The car-sized rover has already been constructed at a cost of $450 million and was scheduled to be sent to the moon next year, when it would have used a one-metre drill to prospect for ice below the lunar surface in soil at the moon's south pole. Ice is considered to be vital to plans to build a lunar colony, not just to supply astronauts with water but also to provide them with hydrogen and oxygen that could be used as fuels... "Quite frankly, the agency's decision beggars belief," said Prof Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. "Viper is a fundamental mission on so many fronts and its cancellation basically undermines Nasa's entire lunar exploration programme for the next decade. It is as straightforward as that. Cancelling Viper makes no sense whatsoever." This view was backed by Ben Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, who was one of the organisers of the open letter to Congress. "A team of 500 people dedicated years of their careers to construct Viper and now it has been cancelled for no good reason whatsoever," he told the Observer last week. "Fortunately I think Congress is taking this issue very seriously and they have the power to tell Nasa that it has to go ahead with the project. Hopefully they will intervene." "When Nasa announced its decision to abandon Viper, the space agency said it planned to disassemble and reuse its components for other moon missions — unless other space companies or agencies offered to take over the project. More than a dozen groups have since expressed an interest in taking over Viper, a Nasa spokesperson told the Observer last week."

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Chinese scientists discovered water molecules in lunar samples brought back by the Chang'e 5 moon probe, marking the first time whole H2O molecules were found in lunar material. The findings have been published in Nature Astronomy. Smithsonian Magazine reports: The team used X-ray diffraction to analyze the grains of moon soil, in which they found a lunar mineral dubbed ULM-1 whose mass is made up of more than 40 percent water and also includes ammonia. "This is a new form of water stored on the moon," Xiaolong Chen, co-author of the study and physics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, tells New Scientist's Alex Wilkins. In the words of CNN's Jessie Yeung, water on the moon is nothing new. Though the samples brought back by the U.S. Apollo missions seemed to show that the moon was dry and lifeless, a recent study suggests that water or hydroxyl may be trapped in glass beads on the moon's surface -- and solar winds could turn the hydroxyl (chemical formula OH) into H2O, according to Yeung. And both American and Indian spacecrafts separately registered what is believed to be water on the moon's surface. This recent discovery, however, marks the first time scientists have found whole molecules of H2O in lunar samples. The findings suggest that "water molecules can persist in sunlit areas of the moon in the form of hydrated salts," the authors write in the study.

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Scientists studying lunar samples brought back by the Apollo missions have determined that the moon's thin atmosphere is produced largely by meteorite impacts. "Our findings provide a clearer picture of how the moon's surface and atmosphere interact over long timescales, [and] enhance our understanding of space weathering processes," said Dr Nicole Nie, the co-author of the new study based at MIT's department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences. The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal Science Advances, Nie and her colleagues describe how the lunar atmosphere must be constantly replenished because its atoms are continuously being lost to space, primarily because of the moon's weak gravity, or trapped on the lunar surface. Ultraviolet photons from the sun can rerelease the latter, but the researchers say replenishment of the atmosphere is thought to rely on atoms being released from within lunar minerals -- either via vaporisation by meteorite impacts, or by solar wind sputtering, a process in which charged particles from the sun hit the moon and eject atoms. But which of the two factors dominates had been unclear, with data from Nasa's lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer, launched in 2013, suggesting both were at play. Nie and colleagues unpicked the conundrum by studying the different forms, or isotopes, of potassium and rubidium in 10 samples of lunar soil from the Apollo missions. The team say meteorite impacts and solar wind sputtering both favor the release of lighter forms of the elements, but that the actual proportion of heavy to light isotopes that end up in the lunar atmosphere and soil would differ depending on the process. "After measuring the isotopic compositions of lunar soils, we built a mathematical model taking into account various space weathering processes, and solve for the contribution of each of them by matching the measured isotopic compositions," said Nie. The results suggest about 70% of the moon's atmosphere is down to impact vaporization and 30% to solar wind sputtering.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: With thousands of species at risk of extinction, scientists have devised a radical plan: a vault filled with preserved samples of our planet's most important and at-risk creatures located on the moon. An international team of experts says threats from climate change and habitat loss have outpaced our ability to protect species in their natural habitats, necessitating urgent action. A biorepository of preserved cells, and the crucial DNA within them, could be used to enhance genetic diversity in small populations of critically endangered species, or to clone and create new individuals in the worst-case scenario of extinction. The proposed lunar biorepository, as described in the journal BioScience, would be beyond the reach of climate breakdown, geopolitical events or other Earth-based disasters. The moon's naturally frigid environment means samples would remain frozen year-round without the need for human involvement or an energy source. By taking advantage of deep craters near the polar regions that are never exposed to sunlight, the moon is one of few places that can provide the ultra-low temperature of -196C necessary to preserve the samples in a way suitable for future cloning. [...] Besides those facing the imminent risk of extinction, the proposed repository would prioritize species with important functions in their environment and food webs. Through careful selection, those housed could be used to re-establish an extinct population on Earth or even to terraform another planet. Dr Mary Hagedorn of the Smithsonian's national zoo and conservation biology institute and the proposal's lead author believes the biorepository proposal will come to fruition, although perhaps not in our lifetime: "We know how to do this and can do this and will do this, but it may take decades to finally achieve," she said. The report says the next steps "will be to develop packaging for the cryopreserved samples that can withstand the conditions of space, and to work out the logistics of transporting samples to the moon."

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