Thanga and his group have sketched a system that may use photo voltaic panels and batteries to supply the ability to push temperatures inside a lava tube right down to the deep freeze wanted to create their lunar ark. That is the defining distinction between Thanga’s design and Hagedorn’s thought experiment. The place Thanga’s group would goal to actively cool the ark, Hagedorn and the Smithsonian group have envisioned a repository that makes use of pure options of the moon to maintain the samples cryogenic.
“The concept behind our proposal is that, to the extent we might make it, it might be passive,” Parenti mentioned. She identified that folks have lengthy speculated concerning the thought of constructing one thing that shops supplies on the moon, however all of the concepts have required a crew to take care of them.
To passively keep a perpetual deep freeze, they’ve proposed constructing the repository on the south pole of the moon the place, inside some craters, coincidences of celestial geometry have aligned to create areas of everlasting shadow, and temperatures will be as little as –196 levels centigrade. These situations would imply that the samples may very well be saved with out want for crew, and so they may very well be maintained with rovers and robotics alone.
Whereas in principle all of this makes these everlasting polar shadows ultimate for such a mission, “we don’t know the fundamentals of what that place is,” Thanga countered. Simply final month, NASA canceled a mission that may have been the primary rover to discover the pole partially due to the technical challenges posed. “This is likely one of the ironic issues,” Thanga mentioned. “It’s close by Earth, however it’s maybe one of the crucial excessive locations in your entire photo voltaic system.”
Fitzpatrick feels assured, nonetheless, that NASA’s present lunar roadmap will present ample alternative to discover and perceive these darkish polar realms, together with a mission scheduled for later this 12 months that plans to land on a ridge overlooking a polar shadow. However as NASA appears to discover these areas, Thanga identified, it’s potential that we’d merely be taught extra about how arduous it’s to exist and function in that stage of chilly.
“Simply working in cryogenic situations, that’s not trivial in any respect,” Thanga mentioned. “Mechanical issues do bizarre issues. They could freeze up, latch up, you identify it, below spacelike situations. Even from reasonably chilly situations in a vacuum, we’ve a phenomenon known as chilly welding,” the place two items of steel fuse on contact.
Thanga argues that the extra wise factor to do, then, is to create the ark in a lava tube since his colleagues in planetary science anticipate these tubes to be fairly just like those we’ve on Earth, albeit a lot colder, which supplies researchers and engineers an understanding of what to anticipate and the way to plan for it.
Very similar to Hagedorn’s idea, nonetheless, value and schedule have but to be refined. However Thanga expects that, after the design is finalized (which might but take years), it may very well be constructed and assembled sooner and cheaper than the Worldwide House Station.
