Show Date: April 19, 2006 
Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

RETURN TO THE MOON
(with a little golf along the way)

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond. Join us each week on Newstalk K57 on Wednesday night from 7 to 8 p.m. for exciting live science expeditions or listen live on our web site www.thedeepradioshow.com

There’s been a lot of news lately about plans to return to Luna, our moon. In two years, NASA will launch two separate spacecraft on the same rocket to explore our sister planet (and that’s our moon and not Venus. Despite the fact that we call our moon a satellite, the Earth and Luna are a double planet system.). The first robot explorer is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or LRO. This little guy is a close cousin to the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter and serves the same purpose: the mapping of the lunar surface in great detail Using the LRO, we’ll get our most detailed pictures ever of the Moon.

The LRO will settle a long-standing controversy because it will take pictures of the Apollo landing sites, proving once and for all that humans went to the Moon almost 40 years ago. So why haven’t we taken pictures of them before? The landing sites always face Earth; they’re always in plain view. Surely, the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?

Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 240,000 miles away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 200 feet wide. The biggest piece of Apollo equipment is only 40 feet across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

The second spacecraft on that rocket has another task. It’s going to look for water on the Moon by crashing into it. Hmmm. Destroying a robot doesn’t seem like the best way to look for water to me, but the LCROSS robot has two main parts. They will separate as the spacecraft approaches the Moon’s south pole and the upper stage will crash into the Moon’s south pole. A plume of pulverized dirt will develop as the lower half, the Shepherding Spacecraft heads in toward the moon. The Shepherding Spacecraft will fly through the plume and use its instruments to analyze the chemical components of the cloud. So why do you want to analyze a bunch of Moon dirt from space? We have Moon rocks now.

LCROSS will really be looking for water in the plume. Scientists suspect that comets that slammed into the Moon billions of years ago may have deposited some of their water and ice into the Aiken Basin, the solar system’s largest crater, which is located at the Moon’s south pole. The Moon rotates straight up and the Sun never shines directly on much of that awesome hole. It could harbor tons of water ice and that ice is key to the exploration, colonization and commercialization of the Moon.

And speaking of commercialization, on a spacewalk tentatively scheduled for this summer, a Russian cosmonaut will take his trusty six iron and a special weightless-friendly tee and put a golf ball into orbit from outside the International Space Station. The golf ball has an embedded transmitter so its location can be tracked. Scientists expect it to orbit for 3 to 4 years before burning up on re-entry. The golf shot is the result of promotional fees paid to the Russian space agency by a Canadian golf club manufacturer. There’s already controversy about adding more space junk into low Earth orbit and how safe this is for the International Space Station.

Join us this week on The Deep as we talk about why water is so important to the Moon’s exploration. We’ll also talk about Russian plans to return to the Moon and that astronaut who wants to play golf in space. The Deep is broadcast on Newstalk K57 every Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. You can also listen live from our web site www.thedeepradioshow.com. Join Jim Sullivan, Pam Eastlick, and Peter Melyan on the deepest radio show on Earth.