I totally agree. We could send a rover to the Moon any time. And - it's relevant to Mars also. Because - on the Moon we can drive our rovers around in near real time - and get experience of roving a surface really quickly. As you say - the Russian lunakhod travelled as far in a few months as Opportunity did in a decade. And that's with early 1970s technology. Lunokhod 2. Nowadays we could drive it around on the Moon almost as easily as the Apollo astronauts drove their lunar buggy, probably could cover tens of kilometers every day if we want to.
Some time we may be able to do the same on Mars using simulated real time - where you simulate the Mars environment as virtual reality here on Earth, continually update it based on information from Mars - and then drive it in the virtual landscape - which has "uncertainty cues" so you can know if you are driving over a bit of landscape you don't know about yet, in which case you would of course stop for your local Earth copy of the Mars landscape to update before driving on again.
Main issue with Mars is the bandwidth, that we can only download a certain amount each day - are limited to times when the orbiters are able to relay the data from the surface, usually (or sometimes direct from the surface to Earth) - but they have priorities too, and many missions need to download to the deep sky network.
With the Moon you'd be able to explore basically the same methods, but without all those technical hurdles.
And the Moon also is far more interesting than we once thought. Especially - all the ice at the poles. Which may contain layered evidence of the evolution of the solar system. And possibility of meteorites from Earth on the Moon. That's especially interesting if they are found as the earliest ones could have fossil or even organic evidence (if buried deep and preserved, maybe in the ice) of the earliest stages of the evolution of Earth - geologically and also biologically. All we have on the Earth from that early era are a few zircons. Not much to go on to try to reconstruct the first few hundred million years after the impact of the Moon.
Dating the Oldest Material on Earth
It may be hard to find but that would be a treasure trove on the Moon, some geological or even biological material from that time period.
And - we don't really understand the Moon that well at all. Just a few places where the Apollo astronauts landed. No surface samples at all from the far side. All the places visited were "contaminated" by ejecta from the Mare Imbrium impact, so we don't have any samples that don't include material from that impact, which may be biasing our results about the Moon.
Also got the caves to explore. And there is the on going thing about Transient Lunar Phenomena. Are they a real phenomenon? A bit of ground truth may help.
And there are ideas and possible lines of evidence that there may be a water layer on the moon a few tens of kilometers below the surface.
The New Moon.
In summary we can explore
Robots far better than humans for this right now. And can control them by telepresence from the Earth. Which I think, eventually, may be how we explore much of the solar system - by telepresence from Earth or from orbiting space stations. Because there are many places just too hazardous to send humans to safely. E.g. surface of Venus. But others also pretty dangerous if not impossible. And other places also - if at all habitable you don't want humans anywhere near them if you want to explore them as scientists, without contaminating them with Earth life. So again robots are ideal for that.
So, can develop that technology on the Moon first. Of course not stop everything else. But I think definitely time for a return to the Moon. And definitely, robots first, not humans at least first few missions because it is such a good opportunity to study the lunar atmosphere. And also we can do so much more with robots now. Not like the Apollo era, with rovers from the Earth it is almost as good as being there ourselves, and in some ways better, and most important, not time limited. So long as the rover is well built and can last for years like the Mars rovers, then you can spend as long as you like anywhere on the Moon studying it.
And I think we have got a rather biased idea of how robot exploration would work from Mars. Because it is so far away and because of the bandwidth and communication difficulties, you get the idea that robotic exploration has to mean this very slow process of just a few images a day, and inching across the surface a 100 meters a day max, and drilling just a few times per mission, and only a few complicated experiments. It makes robotic exploration seem very laborious and slow.
But on the Moon most of those issues would be removed. We could then find out what it is like to really explore robotically. Which after all we do a lot of on the Earth. E.g. deep sea exploration, with robots. Could be as easy and as fast as that on the Moon.
I agree with the questionaire, that "Everything's all about Mars, Mars, Mars.".
The US has ignored even the outer solar system pretty much in favour of Mars. With the exception of Pluto, and some missions to Jupiter.
And for Mars, NASA's plans are based basically on the decadal reivew, and that has many who are keen on human exploration as priority, and especially, on the idea of colonizing Mars as an eventual objective. And the Mars Society and especially Robert Zubrin are a powerful lobby group in the US.
So - even Curiosity C is done in that context. When there are so many scientific experiments that could be sent, including ones that could answer questions about whether there is life on Mars right now, or that could examine the samples to test for chirality - they send an experiment to test the possibility of creating oxygen on Mars - only of interest for colonization as a technology demo, hardly any scientific interest at all. And the idea of sample return seems to me to be much more based on the idea of returning samples to try to prove that Mars is safe for human colonization, than on the idea of returning them out of interest in finding out if there is or was life on Mars. A group of exobiologists submitted a white paper to the decadal review saying that a sample return is not the way to do exobiological exploration of Mars - and their views were not even mentioned in the summing up.
And those who want to colonize Mars think the Moon is boring and has already been done. I think myself that they would have similar ideas about Mars within a couple of years of landing humans there (and incidentally contaminating it so that it can never be studied in its pristine not contaminated by Earth life status).
I think in practice, unless there is a huge change, that probably NASA won't send anything back to the Moon. Basically the idea "Been there, done that, sent humans to the Moon before, it's old news".
I think it's partly a continuation of the same attitude that stopped the lunar exploration at Apollo 17, which was arguably the first truly science lead mission to the Moon - first to send a geologist instead of test pilots. As soon as it got safe enough in their view to send a scientist, they gave up. If it was science led, and given that the costs of subsequent missions once you had the hardware was tiny compared with the original ones, they would have had many more missions after that.
The Mars missions are science led, but still, it's my understanding that they get a lot of their impetus in the US from the idea of humans on Mars. And it seems they just can't get excited in the same way about returning humans to the Moon. And so hard to get funding for a lunar unmanned rover, unless somehow it can be made to seem in some way relevant to this idea of sending humans to Mars.
Another factor though. It's only in the last few years that scientists have begun to get really excited about the Moon. And there is a big lead time for government sponsored missions. And a big lead time also for any space mission too. And there are many things to be sorted out. China's mission shows how hard it is to send an unmanned rover to the Moon - one of the world's wealthiest nations tried and its rover got stuck. Which puts the Russian 1970s accomplishments in perspective.
So maybe NASA will start to get excited about returning to the Moon also.
Whether they do or not, others might. I think there is a decent chance that someone will send a new rover or at least a lander to the Moon in the next few years.
ESA is interested
Europe's first steps on the Moon: the Lunar Lander
Recent UK initiative for a crowd funded lunar polar lander
UK 'to lead moon landing in 10 years'
India plan a lander on the Moon 2016 - 2017
Chandrayaan - 2 - Indian Space Projects
Chinese has lunar plans of course. I expect more attempts at lunar landers from them and they will surely succeed eventually.
Russia has plans
Destination Moon: Russia to Launch New Wave of Lunar Robots
Google X-prize of course ,may lead to something.
Google Lunar XPRIZE
So - there is this resurgence of interest, many of them rovers on the Moon. Indeed, one of the earliest, we may see an Indian lunar rover some time next year or the year after. It's kind of China or India at the moment for lunar rovers I think, for the very near future like next couple of years.
But I don't think NASA has any concrete plans for lunar surface rovers in the near future. I think though it might well change and start to play "catch up" if these other lunar missions begin to catch the headlines and teach us new things about the Moon.
BTW the NASA Lunar Aitken sample return mentioned by Mark Adler is now one of five missions competing for the next New Frontiers mission some time in the 2020s. So if it does happen - that's getting on for a decade away or more, and on the face of it, a 1 in 5 chance of it happening.
NASA receives proposals for new planetary science mission
I think myself that there is a chance all this may change if, for instance we get a wildly successful Indian lunar rover. It wouldn't take much really and would be a major coup for them, and they've already shown that they can do rather amazing things with their MOM mission to orbit Mars. So I'm watching the India spot myself with some interest here :).
If they do, then it may well start the ball rolling with other countries, and especially if they make some interesting discoveries. Whoever it is, I think it will happen some time in the next decade probably. And other countries have none of the colonization priorities of NASA, I don't think India, for instance have any intention at all of trying to colonize anywhere outside of the Earth in the near future. Which leaves them free to use their much smaller budgets for unmanned missions.
Some time we may be able to do the same on Mars using simulated real time - where you simulate the Mars environment as virtual reality here on Earth, continually update it based on information from Mars - and then drive it in the virtual landscape - which has "uncertainty cues" so you can know if you are driving over a bit of landscape you don't know about yet, in which case you would of course stop for your local Earth copy of the Mars landscape to update before driving on again.
Main issue with Mars is the bandwidth, that we can only download a certain amount each day - are limited to times when the orbiters are able to relay the data from the surface, usually (or sometimes direct from the surface to Earth) - but they have priorities too, and many missions need to download to the deep sky network.
With the Moon you'd be able to explore basically the same methods, but without all those technical hurdles.
And the Moon also is far more interesting than we once thought. Especially - all the ice at the poles. Which may contain layered evidence of the evolution of the solar system. And possibility of meteorites from Earth on the Moon. That's especially interesting if they are found as the earliest ones could have fossil or even organic evidence (if buried deep and preserved, maybe in the ice) of the earliest stages of the evolution of Earth - geologically and also biologically. All we have on the Earth from that early era are a few zircons. Not much to go on to try to reconstruct the first few hundred million years after the impact of the Moon.
Dating the Oldest Material on Earth
It may be hard to find but that would be a treasure trove on the Moon, some geological or even biological material from that time period.
And - we don't really understand the Moon that well at all. Just a few places where the Apollo astronauts landed. No surface samples at all from the far side. All the places visited were "contaminated" by ejecta from the Mare Imbrium impact, so we don't have any samples that don't include material from that impact, which may be biasing our results about the Moon.
Also got the caves to explore. And there is the on going thing about Transient Lunar Phenomena. Are they a real phenomenon? A bit of ground truth may help.
And there are ideas and possible lines of evidence that there may be a water layer on the moon a few tens of kilometers below the surface.
The New Moon.
In summary we can explore
- Ice at the poles
- Subsurface ice at lower lattitudes
- Study the lunar atmosphere before we send humans there. It's now over 40 years since Apollo, so the atmosphere is no longer polluted by the exhausts from the Apollo mission rockets, so this is our great opportunity to study the lunar atmosphere to see how it works before we start sending big rockets to the Moon again. Unmanned missions ideal for this as they can be low cost and low weight and not use much rocket fuel
- Search for meteorites from early Earth or indeed throughout the Earth's history, even possible that we find e.g. chunks of ammonites on the Moon as a result of some of the larger impacts in the Earth's history
- Lunar caves
- Transient Lunar Phenomena
- Far side geology
- Geology not affected by debris from Imbrium
- Generally explore areas of the Moon not visited by Apollo
- Even the Apollo sites were not examined in much detail and only last one by a geologist - and for him, his brief "field trip" on the Moon was all too short, the mission controllers had to keep reminding him to hurry back because his time was running out.
- Unmanned rovers on the far side can build long wave radio receivers. These are easy to build - like the radio receiver that first detected pulsars for instance. You can build one just by trailing insulated cables over the surface, from a rover that spools out cable behind it as it travels. (Then later more sophisticated telescopes located in lunar craters for shorter wavelengths).
The advantage here is that the far side is shielded from all the Earth's radio transmissions by the Moon itself - so you could do radio telescope observations of the huge chunks of the radio spectrum that can't be observed at all from Earth due to interference from terrestrial signals.
Robots far better than humans for this right now. And can control them by telepresence from the Earth. Which I think, eventually, may be how we explore much of the solar system - by telepresence from Earth or from orbiting space stations. Because there are many places just too hazardous to send humans to safely. E.g. surface of Venus. But others also pretty dangerous if not impossible. And other places also - if at all habitable you don't want humans anywhere near them if you want to explore them as scientists, without contaminating them with Earth life. So again robots are ideal for that.
So, can develop that technology on the Moon first. Of course not stop everything else. But I think definitely time for a return to the Moon. And definitely, robots first, not humans at least first few missions because it is such a good opportunity to study the lunar atmosphere. And also we can do so much more with robots now. Not like the Apollo era, with rovers from the Earth it is almost as good as being there ourselves, and in some ways better, and most important, not time limited. So long as the rover is well built and can last for years like the Mars rovers, then you can spend as long as you like anywhere on the Moon studying it.
And I think we have got a rather biased idea of how robot exploration would work from Mars. Because it is so far away and because of the bandwidth and communication difficulties, you get the idea that robotic exploration has to mean this very slow process of just a few images a day, and inching across the surface a 100 meters a day max, and drilling just a few times per mission, and only a few complicated experiments. It makes robotic exploration seem very laborious and slow.
But on the Moon most of those issues would be removed. We could then find out what it is like to really explore robotically. Which after all we do a lot of on the Earth. E.g. deep sea exploration, with robots. Could be as easy and as fast as that on the Moon.
WHY HAVEN'T WE DONE IT YET
I agree with the questionaire, that "Everything's all about Mars, Mars, Mars.".
The US has ignored even the outer solar system pretty much in favour of Mars. With the exception of Pluto, and some missions to Jupiter.
And for Mars, NASA's plans are based basically on the decadal reivew, and that has many who are keen on human exploration as priority, and especially, on the idea of colonizing Mars as an eventual objective. And the Mars Society and especially Robert Zubrin are a powerful lobby group in the US.
So - even Curiosity C is done in that context. When there are so many scientific experiments that could be sent, including ones that could answer questions about whether there is life on Mars right now, or that could examine the samples to test for chirality - they send an experiment to test the possibility of creating oxygen on Mars - only of interest for colonization as a technology demo, hardly any scientific interest at all. And the idea of sample return seems to me to be much more based on the idea of returning samples to try to prove that Mars is safe for human colonization, than on the idea of returning them out of interest in finding out if there is or was life on Mars. A group of exobiologists submitted a white paper to the decadal review saying that a sample return is not the way to do exobiological exploration of Mars - and their views were not even mentioned in the summing up.
And those who want to colonize Mars think the Moon is boring and has already been done. I think myself that they would have similar ideas about Mars within a couple of years of landing humans there (and incidentally contaminating it so that it can never be studied in its pristine not contaminated by Earth life status).
I think in practice, unless there is a huge change, that probably NASA won't send anything back to the Moon. Basically the idea "Been there, done that, sent humans to the Moon before, it's old news".
I think it's partly a continuation of the same attitude that stopped the lunar exploration at Apollo 17, which was arguably the first truly science lead mission to the Moon - first to send a geologist instead of test pilots. As soon as it got safe enough in their view to send a scientist, they gave up. If it was science led, and given that the costs of subsequent missions once you had the hardware was tiny compared with the original ones, they would have had many more missions after that.
The Mars missions are science led, but still, it's my understanding that they get a lot of their impetus in the US from the idea of humans on Mars. And it seems they just can't get excited in the same way about returning humans to the Moon. And so hard to get funding for a lunar unmanned rover, unless somehow it can be made to seem in some way relevant to this idea of sending humans to Mars.
Another factor though. It's only in the last few years that scientists have begun to get really excited about the Moon. And there is a big lead time for government sponsored missions. And a big lead time also for any space mission too. And there are many things to be sorted out. China's mission shows how hard it is to send an unmanned rover to the Moon - one of the world's wealthiest nations tried and its rover got stuck. Which puts the Russian 1970s accomplishments in perspective.
So maybe NASA will start to get excited about returning to the Moon also.
Whether they do or not, others might. I think there is a decent chance that someone will send a new rover or at least a lander to the Moon in the next few years.
ESA is interested
Europe's first steps on the Moon: the Lunar Lander
Recent UK initiative for a crowd funded lunar polar lander
UK 'to lead moon landing in 10 years'
India plan a lander on the Moon 2016 - 2017
Chandrayaan - 2 - Indian Space Projects
Chinese has lunar plans of course. I expect more attempts at lunar landers from them and they will surely succeed eventually.
Russia has plans
Destination Moon: Russia to Launch New Wave of Lunar Robots
Google X-prize of course ,may lead to something.
Google Lunar XPRIZE
So - there is this resurgence of interest, many of them rovers on the Moon. Indeed, one of the earliest, we may see an Indian lunar rover some time next year or the year after. It's kind of China or India at the moment for lunar rovers I think, for the very near future like next couple of years.
But I don't think NASA has any concrete plans for lunar surface rovers in the near future. I think though it might well change and start to play "catch up" if these other lunar missions begin to catch the headlines and teach us new things about the Moon.
BTW the NASA Lunar Aitken sample return mentioned by Mark Adler is now one of five missions competing for the next New Frontiers mission some time in the 2020s. So if it does happen - that's getting on for a decade away or more, and on the face of it, a 1 in 5 chance of it happening.
NASA receives proposals for new planetary science mission
I think myself that there is a chance all this may change if, for instance we get a wildly successful Indian lunar rover. It wouldn't take much really and would be a major coup for them, and they've already shown that they can do rather amazing things with their MOM mission to orbit Mars. So I'm watching the India spot myself with some interest here :).
If they do, then it may well start the ball rolling with other countries, and especially if they make some interesting discoveries. Whoever it is, I think it will happen some time in the next decade probably. And other countries have none of the colonization priorities of NASA, I don't think India, for instance have any intention at all of trying to colonize anywhere outside of the Earth in the near future. Which leaves them free to use their much smaller budgets for unmanned missions.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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