The Supermassive Podcast - 35: Astronaut Special: Returning to the Moon

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

The Astronaut Alarm is in overdrive... Izzie, Dr Becky, and his excellency Richard Hollingham have not one but TWO astronauts on this month's episode. From the archive, Richard speaks to NASA astronaut Gene Cernan about Apollo 17 and being the last man on the Moon. ESA Astronaut Matthias Maurer talks about the upcoming Artemis missions which will see humans (hopefully, Matthias himself) return to our rocky neighbour. Plus, Robert Massey is on hand to answer your questions and share his stargazing tips for the month. Read the full interview with the Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan, and find out more about Artemis in our book, The Year In Space. Order here (it's an excellent Christmas present): https://geni.us/jNcrw What cheese is the Moon made of? Email [e-mail] or tweet @RoyalAstroSoc with your thoughts on the debate.  The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.

I think the astronaut alarm is going into overdrive. Could you have a cheese with lunar soil right around the outside? Just going to the moon and picking up a rock is not going to be good enough. We had to accomplish and come back with some answers. Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. This month we're heading back to our rocky neighbor the moon well we aren't Izzy are we at least I don't have any plans to leave the planet in the near future. Well actually I'm going in 10

minutes. Also we're recording this on the morning of the successful launch of Artemis 1 like did we plan this I mean I say we this is behind the scenes info for everyone listening I don't plan anything I turn up when I'm told to but Izzy did you plan this I also I got my people to speak to NASA people you know my team is very extensive obviously you have You have some influence, don't you? Anyway, so we aren't returning to the moon, but space agencies are. Why are they planning to return? When are we going? And well, to help us out today,

we have not one, but two astronauts on the podcast. I think the astronaut alarm is going into overdrive as we speak. So now, Becky, I think we need to have a chat about our editor, Richard Hollingham, The astronaut alarm is going into overdrive as we speak. So now, Becky, I think we need to have a chat about our editor, Richard Hollingham, because bearing in mind, this is where this year started. Here's a clip from January's Q&A episode. We're joined by someone who has been at pretty much every recording we've ever done, lurking in the background, But finally, jumping on the mic, it's Richard Hollingham, our editor,

who happens to know a lot about missions and spaceflight. So we'll be sending those questions his way. You make that sound a bit sinister. Yeah, I thought that too. He did lurking. You're the one who said it. Richard was like, do we need to tell them that I'm actually on every show? I was like, probably yes. Silent participant. Well, he's gone from being a silent participant from January to running this entire episode. Richard, what is happening here? Are you planning some sort of

supermassive takeover? Is this a coup? I'd like to point out there is nothing sinister about this, nothing sinister about me, and I can only apologise. The background is the reason I am on this podcast is because I was privileged enough to interview last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, we'll hear from him in a few minutes time, 50 years after the Apollo 17 mission. And for administrative reasons, because essentially no one else was available, I've also done an interview with European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer about the return to the moon. And he, as you will gather, is in a very good position to be one of the first European astronauts on the moon. I was so mad when I got that email from you

when you were like, I'm free at this time to interview Matthias Maurer. And I was like, no, I'm not. I was on top of a mountain. I mean, like legit, I was in Albania in a mountain. Like this is not going to happen on a mountain. That would be impressive. but we've got a full house obviously dr robert massey the deputy director of the royal astronomical society

is here too so robert why go back to the moon and why do science there yeah i mean the interesting thing about artemis is that it's described that nasa is making a point of describing science as the cake for Artemis, rather than the icing on the cake, as they now retrospectively describe it for Apollo. So there are lots of different reasons for doing lunar science. You can do things like track the evolution of the solar system, looking at crater counts and how they changed over time, probing the interior of the moon with lunar seismology,

going to the poles, which is one of the goals of the Artemis program, to get the ice there and see if some of the stuff deposited there is so old that it tells us about the materials that the prebiotic chemistry that helped life start on on earth uh you know drilling down into the soil uh looking at the evolution of the sun over time because of the way it affects the rocks the radiation from the sun and if you're very very ambitious and have a lot of money you could do things like build a radio telescope or a different kind of observatory on the far side of the moon but we're a little way off that i think but i should say too that you know there is a debate about this there are plenty of people like martin reese the astronomer

royal here in the uk who argues that we should just use robots for this stuff and that we should leave exploration to the private sector so there is still that debate there but it's probably not something to dwell on on the day that artemis launched successfully you know something that's really something to celebrate well cheers robert we'll catch up with you later in the show to take on listener questions with me and also just a quick fyi for everybody listening if you haven't got a copy of our book the year in space yet then there are two big sections about the moon in there if you want to check that out. And I hear it makes an excellent stocking filler or Christmas presents for the, you know, space fans in your life. So as always, there will be a link to The Year in Space

in our bio. Now let's get on to the moon. So on December the 7th of 1972, the final mission to the moon blasted off from Cape Canaveral. Four days later, Commander Gene Cernan and geologist Harrison Smith landed on the moon. So Richard, tell us about this mission. So Apollo 17 was really the culmination of the Apollo programme. By now, by 1972, 10 men had walked on the moon. But it had really gone from the first landing, so Apollo 11, from grabbing a rock to serious scientific investigation.

You know, America had won the space race, now gets serious about the science. And from Apollo 15 onwards. And playing golf. Well, yes. Serious science and playing golf. Okay, well, they had to have some fun as well. They had to enjoy. It's a bit unfair to not enjoy the experience if you're on the moon.

So from the J-class missions onwards, Apollo 15 onwards, serious science went on. I mean, and fundamental discoveries, things that we take for granted now about the moon, the fact that there was and is no life on the moon. We really didn't know that. We could have assumed that. We didn't know that before the Apollo missions. And also another fundamental scientific discovery about the moon, that the moon and Earth share a common ancestor, that the moon was now widely accepted, was formed by this collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized object. So that's all from Apollo.

Apollo 17, also the first scientist on the moon. So you had Ron Evans in orbit around the moon, and then on the moon itself, Gene Cernan and Harrison Smith, or Harrison Jack Smith, as he's sometimes known. And Gene Cernan, a remarkable astronaut, a veteran of the Gemini program. He almost died during a spacewalk. He almost died during Apollo 10, the buildup to the first moon landing where his spacecraft spun out of control around the moon. And you look at the stats on Apollo 17. I mean, it's extraordinary. 75 hours on the moon, 22 hours outside on the moon. I mean, that's more than the spacewalks now. Absolutely extraordinary. They

drove 22 miles in the lunar rover, and they brought back 111 kilograms of moon rock to the Earth. So, I mean, by any metric, a really remarkable mission. And I was lucky enough to interview Gene Cernan three times, the last in 2016, a few months before he died. And here are some extracts from two of those interviews and a taste of the sheer exuberance of the mission. And there it is, Houston. There's Camelot. Wild target. I see it. We got them all. 42 degrees.

Yes, we were happy. Yes, we had a good time. I told Ron, Ron Evans and Jack Schmidt, I said, guys, you're only going to come this way once. Enjoy yourself. We've trained. We knew. We didn't go to the moon not to be successful. We didn't go not to come back.

We had a job to do. Guys, enjoy it. Okay, Houston, the Challenger has landed. What's your Challenger? That's a zipper. Okay. Boy, you bet it is, Gordo. But you said shut down. joy. Every flight we had built upon the previous flight, built upon the successes and built upon the failures. And when we got to Apollo 17, I think we were really prepared. I'm on the footpad in Houston. I step off at the surface at Taurus Littoral. I'd like to dedicate the first steps of Apollo 17

to all those who made it possible. I came out here. Oh, my golly. Unbelievable. Unbelievable, but is it bright in the sun? From a scientific point of view, I took a scientist. Wasn't an aviator, but he was sort of a micro-scientist. He looked at the small picture.

I'm an engineer. I'm an aviator. I looked at the big picture, macro scientists. The geologists loved us because Jack Schmidt would see the little things and I'd back up and look at the mountains and say, wow, where'd they come from? How did this get here? And the scientists were able to put the pictures, our comments, and everything else we brought back together. The pictures, our comments, and everything else we brought back together had got a much broader and bigger picture from the macro to the micro. And that made me feel good. They said, this is the best science experience, a flight we've ever had.

And that was part of the reason we went. You know, you want to do a good job. You want to be proud of what you did. And to come back with nothing would have been somewhat of a... Just going to the moon and picking up a rock was not going to be good enough. We had to accomplish and come back with some answers to questions we didn't even know to ask, smart enough to ask. I was strolling on the moon one day

In the merry, merry month of December May, May, May, that's right. in the merry, merry month of December. May. May. May, that's right. And what can people do that robots can't? I mean, this is the whole argument. What could you do that you couldn't do with robotic craft? Think. Intelligence.

Change your mind. You know, I don't care. You can make a robot, but you can never put a brain in it. A robot is only as smart as we make it before we send it. This brain right here is the most complex computer in the world. It can change its mind. It can look here. When have we had a ticker tape parade for a robot?

Okay? It's the human courage. It's the human courage. It's the human culture. It's human ability to think. It's the human ability to understand what discovery is. We're curious. The brain is curious. You can't make a robot curious.

And curiosity is the essence of human existence. What's on the other side of that hill? What's across the river? Now, a robot may not care and it may not ask the question, but you do. And then what you do with it is, you know, there's just, people ask that question all the time. The human brain is beyond conception.

It's beyond my capability to even think what's up there. Patch is closed. Barely. Hey, Jack, don't lock it. I'm not going to lock it. We've got to go back there. You lose the key and we're in trouble. Hey, who's been tracking up my loader surface?

Okay. Just walk around for a second hey man how much thought went into your your final your final words and your final statement because they they'd got they're going to last people are going to remember those well and i i'm more of an ad-lib guy i didn't, I was asked over and over and over again by the press, what are you going to say? The last man in the room, I don't know what I'm going to say. And I didn't know until the night before I left. I scribbled a couple of words down on a checklist and I sort of picked up where Neil left off. We now leave as we once came and God willing, we shall return. And the thing about going up the ladder, as I remember, it was written somewhere, Godspeed, the crew of Apollo 17.

I just put those words, I tend to put the words together as they come to me. I, honest to God, did not know what I was going to say until we left and i really didn't i you know and after we came home and i listened to him well okay this is gene and i'm on the surface and as i take man's last step from the surface back home for some time to come but we believe not too long into the future i'd like to just let what I believe history will record that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon in Taurus literal, we leave as we came, and God willing, as we leave the moon and towards Littrow, we leave as we came,

and God willing, as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind. God speed the crew of Apollo 17. When I left the moon and started up the ladder, I really was at a loss because, number one, I didn't want to leave. Number two, we had to. We didn't have the oxygen and the water, everything else we needed to stay much longer. I looked down at my last footsteps, and I realized they were mine, but I also realized I wouldn't come in this way again. Somebody would, but it wouldn't be me. And I looked over my shoulder and looked

at the earth and I described the meaning of it to me, particularly because I could see it and feel it three-dimensionally. It had dynamics, it had impact, it was alive, and it was moving with purpose and with beauty through this endlessness of space and time. I look back at that and I said, in those short few minutes, I wanted to figure out what was the meaning, what was the significance of our having left the cradle of civilization and called the moon our home for three days. What does that mean to the future

and when you splash down did you think that was going to be the the end well i mean for 40 40 years more than 40 years in terms of the moon program? Or was there some optimism at the time that this would continue? No, we knew Apollo 17 was the last flight. So we had 20 flights, and 19 and 20 got cancelled fairly early. And later on, 18 got cancelled. 18 was out there for a while because we did have a geologist, and they wanted to make room to get him to fly. 18 was out there for a while because we did have a geologist and they wanted to make room to get him to fly. And then, you know, someone decided that maybe we had enough

or maybe it was politics, maybe it was money. Maybe it was, you know, what are we going to do with all the scientific information we already know? And they canceled 18 and that sort of pushed Jack Schmidt, the science part of the mission, to 17. And that's what made the who's gonna fly the mission a little bit of a controversy. But yeah, we knew that when we splashed down,

Apollo was over. And that we truly were the tail of the dog. Recovery, America, stable one and the crew is gone. Great deal of cheering going on here in the control center as the splice down was watched in real time from the recovery helicopter.

That was the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan. And you can read more of that interview in The Year in Space, our book, with some fantastic images as well. Richard, you mentioned some of the rocks they'd brought back there. Some are still being investigated, right? That is one of the most extraordinary things.

In 2019, scientists opened for the first time one of the sample tubes, a little core of moon soil and rock that those apollo 17 astronauts had had taken and now able to use modern techniques and it's it's still pristine it is when they put it into the uh the sample tube back in 1972 so now you can do 3d imaging on it use advanced microscopes mass spectrometry to to work out its chemical composition. And what they've been looking at is the in the late 60s and early 70s, to look at them 40, 50 years on and use modern techniques to do that. So Apollo science, you know, scientists around the world are still looking at those rocks. I've seen some too, can I just say?

Oh, yeah. Where was that? I mean, I can't tell you where because it's considered like a security risk. Sorry. But oh my gosh, it was incredible. It was so cool to see. So what does the future of returning to the moon look like? Well, as we've established today, which is November the 16th, 2022, Artemis 1 finally began its climb to loop around the moon. I mean, it's super convenient for us. Thank you very much,

NASA. So in two years time, we'll see the first astronauts flying around the moon. They're not going to be landing there. That's on Artemis 2. But the first step will finally take place in three years time with Artemis 3. But then comes Artemis 4 and 5, which involves European astronauts. Now, these flights won't take them to the surface of the moon, but to something called Gateway, a station orbiting our rocky neighbor. And the hope is that an ESA astronaut will finally walk on the surface around 2027, 2028, 2029, something like that, the end of this decade. So safe to say there is very much a plan in place. Now, one person who is hoping to be stepping foot on the moon is European Space

Agency astronaut and material scientist Matthias Maurer. Richard caught up with him recently and started, in my opinion, with a rather big question. I know that as European astronauts, you all get on pretty well with each other, but there is going to be competition for that seat, isn't there? I mean, you'll want to be the astronaut that goes to the moon. That's correct. I mean, there's always competition. I mean, even for flights to the ISS, there's competition.

But in the end, we all got our flights, or some have already had their second flight. So there will also be routes, and it will be a team effort. And the first three tickets that we have will not be the last three tickets. We are just about to fly to the moon. When we land on the moon, we will not have our moon station. We will have maybe in the beginning a rover, later on a pressurized rover, which Japan is about to develop. And at a later stage, we will hopefully have a permanent station, like a station that we have today in Antarctica.

So there will be more flight opportunities for Europeans and for Canadians, for Japanese, for Americans. for Americans, and in the long run, even the new European astronauts that were now selected at the end of November will all have their chance to fly to the moon, hopefully. Now, I was lucky enough to interview the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, three times, actually. But he was, particularly in his latter interviews, almost despairing of the fact that we'd not been back to the moon for 50 years.

Are we now on track? Are we now picking up? And is this a long-term plan to go and to stay rather than to go and to come back and just plant the flag? Yes, I'm absolutely sure that now we are on a good track that we will fly to the moon. It's even if NASA would decide to step out, there would be the commercial companies who would pick up the lead and say,

OK, if you don't implement it, we have gained so much expertise. We have now developed so much hardware. We can do it. But I'm pretty sure NASA will lead the way, especially since there is the competition with the Chinese. The Chinese want to fly to the moon and land there at 2030. So it's a kind of a new space race that has developed. Europe wants to be part of it as well. I'm pretty, pretty sure that now it's a fact that we will strive to fly to the moon,

that we will land there and that we will see a permanent station on the moon. Now, you've done quite a lot of the training and this training. How is your geology going? What sort of geology have you been doing? Because a lot of it is about the geology, isn't it? Yes, that's correct. So looking at the moon here from planet Earth, we see a round body with a lot of scars in there. And in this round body, we see light areas and we see dark areas.

So the dark areas are the volcanic regions. And that we can practice here on planet Earth on the island of Lanzarote. It's a Spanish island, Canary Island. And so we learn how to study the environment, how to read geology there, and how to decide where to take meaningful samples. Because when bringing back samples from moon to earth, you need to bring back the best samples. Our job as astronaut is like to go to these places that they have identified and to find the facts on the ground that would either confirm or contradict the theory.

And that is the most efficient way to produce science on the moon. So the dark areas are the volcanic areas. The light areas is the oldest surface area of the moon. It's the old primordial crust of the moon. And in Europe, we find only in very few places, areas that have the same geology. In our case, we fly to Norway, to the islands of the Lofoten. And there we can practice taking samples

and to study the unorthosite geology formation. And then the scar area on the surface of the moon, these are impact craters. But on our planet Earth, it's more difficult to find impact craters. In Europe, we have a very prominent one, which is in southern Germany, it's the Ries crater. I believe that was an asteroid of a diameter of 150 metres, if I remember well, that impacted here several million years ago and created a crater with around 30, 40 kilometres of diameter. So a really massive impact crater. So as an astronaut, I mean, it sounds pretty good.

You get to go to Lanzarote, beautiful part of Norway and southern Germany. But that's surely very different, walking around in shorts and T-shirts, looking at rocks, than if you're going to be in a bulky space suit on the moon. How can you simulate that? Because you don't want to waste time, do you? How can you simulate that? Because you don't want to waste time, do you? That's correct. I mean, the current suits are so stiff and so rigid that we can probably walk on a flat surface. But climbing down a crater, and that's the interesting areas where we want to go to. We want to find ice on the moon, which is very, very deep in very cold craters. These craters are always in the dark, and that's why the ice remains there in a frozen state. There we have the coldest temperatures in our solar system, and the current materials that we

use for our spacesuits are not made for such cold environments. So obviously, we need to work hard on the technology to improve our equipment that we can bring on the moon. So obviously, we need to work hard on the technology to improve our equipment that we can bring on the moon. So when we now train to explore the moon, we do it first here in a t-shirt because that's the most convenient way to study. The technical level to do the same stuff in a spacesuit will come at a later point in time.

But the place where we could practice this would be our new lunar facility. Lunar facility means we have at the European Astronaut Center, a facility in Cologne, we will build a new installation. And there we will have a copy of the surface of the moon. But we can have the real lunar sand that has the same chemical composition and the same crane size like the sand on the moon. And we will have a gravity offloading system which allows us to walk and work on the surface with one sixth of Earth's gravity. We will have moonlight conditions because the light on the moon is very particular.

It's a point source, it's the sun, but we have no atmosphere. So the light is very intense and the shadow is absolutely black. So if you put anything down in the shade area, it's so dark that you wouldn't find it anymore.

It's also difficult to move through a rough terrain. So all these conditions are very particular and we need to practice them and that we cannot do in Lanzarote or in Norway. That we need to do in a facility like Luna. You mentioned the gravity offloading. How do you do that?

Because I take it that ESA has not invented an anti-gravity machine. You mentioned the gravity offloading. How do you do that? Because you can't, you haven't invented, I take it that ESA has not invented an anti-gravity machine. No, we don't have any anti-gravity machine. That would be perfect. No, what we do is more what people know from concerts, when the rock star is suspended on a rope and flying in, being weightless from left to right on the stage. We will have such a gravity offloading system that will hopefully, it's still in development,

allow that two astronauts and maybe a rover even can work together, being partially suspended by this rope and walk around and kneel down, bend down or walk down some slopes. So all that stuff needs to be practiced. Also handling tools, drilling. It's all more challenging if you cannot use your full body weight. Are you looking forward to your first footstep on the moon then? Well, it's like I'm hoping to fly to the moon. If I can actually walk on the moon, I would be super lucky.

But already being part of this mission, being part of Artemis 4 or 5 is already a massive achievement. And it's always a team effort. So not everyone will have the opportunity to really walk on the moon. Some of us might fly only to the Gateway Station. But yes, it's a big dream that we all share that we want to walk on the moon. But yes, it's a big dream that we all share that we want to walk on the moon. Astronaut Matthias Maurer from the European Space Agency. And I interviewed him recently on the ESA Open Day. And he was just so lovely and just super enthusiastic, as I think you probably would be if your name was on the list to maybe return to the moon. But I love the idea of this astronaut training center with them trying to mimic the lack of gravity just having astronauts on ropes in my mind though i think it's more of

like a budget pantomime vibe rather than isa high tech but i would still i would love to see that yeah i always picture them like scuba diving in these like huge tanks and stuff so every time i go scuba diving i'm like look i could stuff so every time i go scuba diving i'm like look i could be an astronaut no i couldn't i really really couldn't are you pretending that you're an astronaut becky when i scuba dive yes yes i do this is the supermassive podcast from the royal astronomicalomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Seathurst and with science journalist Izzy Clark. This month, it's all about humans returning to the moon. But before we get to listener questions, I think we need to regroup on last month's topic about deflecting asteroids and planetary defence. So we came in, we said we knew about every single hazardous asteroid.

Almost every big one. Well, almost, yeah, because literally four days later, after the episode went live, there was a news story that changed all of that. And astronomers discovered a big old planet killer size asteroid hiding in the sun's glare. But, you know, luckily, we don't need to be worried about this asteroid. It's called 2022 AP7.

We don't have to be worried, do we? Please confirm. No, not really. These things happen quite a lot. You know, actually, if you look over this sort of history of the news of asteroids as they've been discovered over the last 20 or 30 years, very often you get, oh, you know,

killer asteroid on the way or just going past the earth it's not that unusual now on the one hand that means you know great all these things have gone past us on the other hand i suppose it does mean there are still things out there that we don't find because actually it's really difficult if they're coming from the direction of the sun they're not very big they're pretty faint you know you think of this rock from space actually by the time you see it with your eyes it's too late um so it doesn't trouble me it's not going to get near the earth or dangerously close to the earth for at least hundreds of years in the future but there is this long-term risk that the orbit gets slightly reshaped as it goes around the sun and interacts with the gravity of the earth for example and

eventually it will get close to the earth and then there might be a risk in the far future and is a couple of kilometers across and that's at the level of what we call a planet killer, which is not a very cheery title, really. So we do need to worry about it a bit, but not so much that I would lose sleep over it. Yeah, I think it was overhyped just because of its size, because it is kilometers across, and it had been hiding or whatever.

And also there was this fact that kept being thrown around that people massively misinterpreted is this thing called the minimum orbit intersection distance or MOID as an acronym. Oh, they love an acronym. Which was 0.05 AU. So AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun. So it was coming within, you know,

what's that 5% of the Earth sun distance to the Earth and the Sun. So it was coming within, you know, what's that, 5% of the Earth-Sun distance to the Earth. But that's just where the orbits of the two things intersect. The asteroid and the Earth don't necessarily come that close together. But this is why in a couple of hundred years or so, as Robert was talking about, it could be. But for now, you know, it's literally on the opposite side of the Sun.

So it's nowhere near us. 5% of 150 million kilometres is still a long way. It's still millions of kilometers away, much, much further away than the moon. So, yeah, it's nothing to be immediately concerned about. There we go. I think it's just because it was the largest discovered for a couple of years. People were like, ooh. Others went, that's cool.

Now it's a worry about. And the media went, yeah, well. And that always happens exactly i do like the idea these asteroids are just hiding away you know sort of keeping themselves out of view just keeping us on our toes i suppose that is the coolest thing yeah thinking that there's this whole collection of asteroids that could be in a similar position that we can't see that would be really cool yeah you can argue with my use of the word cool there, isn't it? It's interesting. Okay, so let's go on to some listener questions about the moon.

My boyfriend's rather unhelpful suggestion was, what cheese is it made of? But he's a chef, so everything for him. Well, I know this, and I feel like this is a duh question every time I say it. It's Morbier, obviously, because it's got the grey ash around the outside. Duh. Okay, well, there we go. I was going to say E-Zam. Isn't that the one in the hole?

No other cheese lovers? Well, I guess that's what listeners can message in. What cheese is the moon made of if it were made of cheese? It's Morbier. There's no argument. There's no argument. Morbier's covered in a layer of grey ash just like the moon. Could you have a cheese with lunar soil wrapped around the outside?

That would be so expensive. No, but I feel this is a new outreach project for the Royal Astronomical Society. Dear NASA, can we borrow some moon rock to grind up and wrap some cheese, do you mind? And sell it for one million pounds. That would be the exact point. Auction it for charity, Izzy.

Auction it for charity. Oh yeah, auction it for charity. Sorry, not season four of the Supermassive podcast yes charity um anyway let's go to the actual questions so robert sam haynes on instagram asks do you think the outer space treaty will hold if multiple countries are making plans for moon territory good question there sam so the outer space treaty was signed back in 1967 and primarily to stop the use of weapons of mass destruction in space because unbelievably the superpowers did detonate a couple of nuclear weapons in orbit and it does things like destroy electrical systems on the ground so they wanted to stop that and it also is supposed to enshrine

peaceful exploration of space you know so yeah sending astronauts to the moon to do science and prevent things like appropriation of celestial bodies, including the moon and other things like Mars and so on. So, you know, not the idea that it's a bit like the Antarctic Treaty. You don't have this idea that, you know, powers can grab bits of the moon or other planets. So, and it led to something called the Moon Treaty in 1979, But hardly any countries have actually signed and ratified that. So it's never really taken effect. But it's supposed to, again, enshrine peaceful exploration of space. Now, the issue probably is that if, and this is a huge if, because I don't think it's that viable commercially at all. It might be good if you've got a base there.

But if you could do, say, things like mining on the moon and extract mineral resources like the rare earth elements that are there in abundance or very, very theoretically use a type of helium called helium-3 to make fusion nuclear reactors, this is all some way off. Then it's just possible that there might be commercial interest and national interest in grabbing that and there might be that kind of competition and legally it's a bit difficult to know whether that's well protected because even the Artemis Accords that the UK and other countries signed to allow exploration of the moon and things like the Artemis missions are not really quite clear that that's absolutely prevented so there is a sort of issue but it's more immediate than the asteroid risk but it's still a long way off because I don't think we're that close at all to setting up mines to the moon and getting stuff to the earth. You know, it might be there to supply a base, but I really don't see, you know, going to the moon to mine minerals is still phenomenally expensive. You know, whether you watch Moon, the film or not, it's not really viable in the near future. So for that reason, it doesn't trouble me too much.

I don't think we'll see immediate rivalry like that. I think we're a long way from having those sort of routine flights flights large numbers of people on the moon where that might become an issue okay okay um becky kiva cocklin wants to know will we explore the dark side aka the far side yeah so remember dark side of the moon that that changes all the time so when we have a new moon the dark side is the near side to us like the side that's dark is the one that you changes all the time so when we have a new moon the dark side is the near side to us like the side that's dark is the one that you know we can't see that's facing us and when we have a full moon the dark side is the far side we only ever see one side of the moon because it's what's called tidally locked with us so it spins on its axis in the same time that it takes to go

around the earth so its day is as long as its year essentially so will artemis missions explore the far side the one that we can't actually see from earth sort of yes what we know for now is that there's been 13 landing sites selected for artemis 3 when astronauts will actually land on the moon and they're all on the south pole of the moon so you can think of them as sort of being like half on the near side half on the far side if they're at the south pole right yeah and they've been chosen for like scientific reasons there's areas of the south pole that are in craters that are permanently shadowed there's no sunlight that's ever hit them so they're in this sort of almost like pristine condition

being shaded from sunlight. They've never been hit by UV light. So there's none of the chemical reactions that take place because of that. And it's very, very old rock as well. So you can learn about sort of the history of the moon and therefore the history of the solar system along with that as well. But also the shadowed regions, which are shaded from sunlight, are most likely to contain water ice. So we can investigate sort of the distribution and the depth and the composition of water ice on the moon if we go to the South Pole as well.

Okay, thank you, Becky. Okay, and Robert, Thomas Lawrence wants to know, will we visit Apollo sites like we did with the Surveyor missions? I mean, Thomas, wouldn't that be really cool? The thing is, interestingly, it turns out, and you're quite right, it already happened because the Apollo 12 mission, only the second mission to the moon after Apollo 11, which also, by the way, happened in late November 1969, a week before I was born. So, you know, this is this is aging me here, but I don't remember it, obviously.

was born so you know this is this is uh aging me here but don't remember it obviously and uh the Apollo 12 astronauts landed right next to the Surveyor 3 lander that had been spent sent a few years earlier and had a look at it. Surveyor 3 was a robotic mission part of the NASA effort in the 1960s to explore the moon before the Apollo landings and of course the Soviet Union was doing the same time and it landed on the the moon in Oceanus Procellarum in a small crater. And it was a soft landing mission, a robotic one controlled from the Earth. So we have done this kind of thing before. But I think there is a really good question for the future, which is, if we start to explore the moon properly with people, do you want to protect those Apollo landing sites? And should they be international heritage sites of some kind on

the moon? Should we think about space archaeology, like people like Alice Gorman talk about, and seek to protect them? And also, you know, as well as that, should we be protecting the wider lunar landscape too? But I think I'd be really surprised if we don't, if we have a lot of people on the moon, if we have a permanent base, if we have people exploring further afield, then it seems very likely to me.

It won't happen with the first few Artemis missions, because a lot of the priorities for those are places like the South Pole, where you've got ice and so on, and the idea of setting up some kind of presence there. But I think in maybe perhaps the 2040s or 50s, we might start to see that kind of thing, a sort of very, very expensive form of heritage visit. Okay, and Becky Pretty Princess on Twitter asks, will it be possible for a permanent base to extract water from moon rock and regolith? And if so, what kind of technology would that require? Yep, that is the exact idea here.

You know, you don't want to have to ship water, say for life support, if you've got a permanent base for astronauts on the moon, you know, you save weight in whatever you're, you know, you're sending with the rocket as well. So therefore you wouldn't need as much fuel to launch it. You can also extract oxygen from water to breathe and then hydrogen from water for rocket fuel as well. So this is why, you know, with Artemis 3, they're landing on the South Pole. We think there's a lot of water so

they can investigate, you know, how much is actually there and is it easily accessible as well? Because if it's easily accessible or not, that kind of determines what tech you would need to actually do this. You know, if it's just sat there on the surface as ice, then great. You can send a few astronauts with some shovels and that's a very low tech operation or maybe some sort of robots with shovels to collect it. of robots with shovels to collect it um it was on the surface it's fairly easy to scrape it all up and then melt it down into water with fairly little energy use you know with power from like solar panels or something if it's deep down in craters you know sort of like a few maybe even hundreds of meters deep at the bottom of a crater i think the plan would be then to send you know some sort of robotic probe down into the crater,

but you would need to light the way. So there's been sort of suggestions that you could take big mirrors and sort of angle them to reflect sunlight into these craters for pretty much the first time, like reflect it down into there. That's obviously heavy launch as well to take a giant mirror up there. So you'd have to think that through. But then also if it's underground, you know, sort of if it's quite deep, the water ice in the Martian surface, then you have to think about, well, could you heat it in some way, maybe with sort of microwave heating, something like that. And then it would essentially evaporate, turn into vapor, and then you would condense it down somehow, perhaps put a big metal plate over the surface and scrape it

off there, something like that. You've essentially got to weigh up the cost benefit of doing that because, you know, microwave heating, it probably take a lot of energy, solar panels, you know, is it worth collecting that much water in that way? Once you have the water, the next technical challenge is storage. Like where do you keep it? Especially if you do separate it through electrolysis into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as well, because it is best to keep it in that liquid form. There's more energy to do that as well. So it's lots of engineering challenges, but it'll all depend on what Artemis 3 finds when it gets to the South Pole. Obviously, it might not be embedded in moon rock necessarily. It could just be sat there on the surface you know like an

ice sort of cap in in craters or something like that in which case you just send astronauts with shovels right to start collecting it and there's also this question from andy lamb who's emailed in to say amazing show i am now officially addicted to the supermassive podcast i think i need an intervention love that um and he goes on to ask our recent missions to mars have undoubtedly left human debris on the face of a pristine planet the trips to the moon during the apollo missions left an array of litter on the moon from flags to a moon rover are there any plans in future missions to the moon to remove any of this space litter? Well, that's a brilliant question, isn't it? And one I hadn't really thought about was removing all this stuff and restoring the landscape, you know, the kind of things like if you go off into the countryside, take nothing but pictures and, you know, all the rest of it.

Yeah, I don't think there's any serious plans to remove it. And I suppose then again, you also might consider some of this stuff is archaeology again it's evidence of our presence however whether we would really want to see some of this about 180 tons of stuff all these crashed missions as well as successful soft landing apollo spacecraft and moon rovers and so on as everything we want to retrieve is a good question you know do we do we really see things like bags of human waste that were chucked out of the spacecraft and left on the surface as something we really want to worry about preserving for posterity? I mean, it's preserved on the surface anyway, obviously.

You know, is a very good question. I think probably not. But you would argue that to an extent, those trash piles have some kind of archaeological merit. So I don't think anybody's ever seriously talked about cleaning up the sites, but maybe we ought to do that in future. Perhaps we should say, or we should just be discarding all this stuff in the way that was done in the 60s.

So I'm just thinking about a T-shirt that astronauts could wear that was like, I went all the way to the moon and all I found was a bag of freeze-dried poop. And all I got was this T-shirt. Exactly. There is actually some viable science, useful science science to be done on that astronaut waste from a biological perspective are the bacteria in that way still viable how have they survived and what has happened to them over 50 odd years on the moon so i think that's actually a really

interesting biological experiment can you imagine if there's tardigrades just i mean that was done yeah they were the ones that crashed on that israeli spacecraft when they thought they probably wouldn't survive but i guess i guess the example comes back to uh surveyor 3 again that robotic mission that landed because there was controversy around the idea that they'd scraped off some bacteria i think it's streptococcus bacteria that they found when they'd scraped some stuff off. They brought the camera back to Earth and they found these on there. And the suggestion was it was probably contaminated in the lab on Earth. So they're probably not viable.

But it is a good question, I guess, if you have the PhD project of opening up one of those bags of waste to see what you find. Yeah, we have this expression that's like, oh, that would be really cool to do, but it's probably some poor sod PhD student's job. They'll get a good PhD out of it, they'll like to say. I'd read that paper. Yeah, so would I, to be fair. Exactly. Becky will be a nice supervisor for them.

Well, thank you to everyone who sent in their questions. Please do keep them coming because they are brilliant. They really are. Yeah, so if you want to send us any for a future episode, then just email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet at Royal Astro Sock. Okay, Robert. So what can we see in the night sky this month?

Well, despite this episode being all about the moon, actually the most prominent thing in the night sky, the thing that I'm most excited about is Mars, and mars again because it's coming to what's good yes if mars is your favorite planet it's definitely the month for you um it comes to opposition on the 8th of december which means it's opposite the sun in the skies it's absolutely the best time to see it's visible all night really high up from uk skies in the uh constellation of taurus up above of ryan and sort of rise in the east move across high into the south and then set in the constellation of taurus up above of ryan and sort of rise in the east move across high into the south and then set in the west at the end of the night now uh it's it's really great

you know you can look at it it's closest to the earth actually a few days before that because the shape of the martian orbit but good all month so if you've never seen it go out and have a look it's brighter than any star apart from the sun obviously so it's really really distinct and it does look very very red if you have a small telescope then you can look you know look at it through that it's well worth it binoculars aren't going to show you much other than a tiny disc but a small telescope decent magnification nice stable skies and you should see a few dusky markings and if you're very lucky things like the polar ice cap now i should also say for the sake of people like becky in particular the saturn is still just about visible so the favorite planet is hanging in there a bit longer jupiter still

very obvious as well and referring to the being a bit more on topic the moon is now at the time of year where it starts to get easier to see in the evening sky rather than the morning and towards the end of this year it'll be a really lovely crescent moon from about christmas day onwards it's really good to look at then you can see the craters very well when it's illuminated like that because you've got those long shadows as the crescent fattens. Did the universe get me a toenail moon for Christmas? Thanks, universe. There will indeed be a toenail moon for Christmas.

There is actually even on Christmas Day itself. So if you're up early before you've opened those presents, Becky, then look out for the toenail moon. Actually, no'm wrong it's the evening sky isn't it look at look after you've opened the presents in the evening look at the toenail moon but there is a there is also really unusual things if you want to have fun with that if you've got a clear sky in the morning on the 30th of december you can look for features like the lunar x and v which is where the the illumination the sun creates this optical illusion of a of an x feature on the moon between the night and day line uh and uh then later in the month well across the month

actually there are there are things like a meteor shower the gemini's meteor shower on the 14th of december it's not absolutely ideally well placed it's got a lot of meteors but the moon will ironically given the topic of the podcast interfere with it because it it's so bright then it's a bit past full moon so interfere with it because it's so bright then, it's a bit past full moon. So later in the night, it's light, washes out everything else in the sky. But a couple of hours after sunset, as it's dark, it's worth having a look to see if you can see some nice meteors. And then of course, this is, you know, we're heading right into the depths of winter now. Orion and Taurus really, really high up in the sky later on in the night. Very, very

obvious. If you're actually further south than we are then you've also got these beautiful southern stars like canopus below sirius which is the brightest star in the sky and i can appreciate it's also a good time of year to start for looking looking at things like our satellite galaxies the large and small magellanic clouds there's a lot out there december january and so on a really really good time to look at the sky if you can stand the cold get out there you've got dark skies long nights you don't have to be out too late to look at the sky in the first place and there's a lot to see so i think we can agree that it's just a brilliant time to look up at the skies and i think that is it for this month we'll be back next time

with a very special stargazing episode i'm'm so excited. So keep your fingers crossed for clear skies because we'll be going to visit an observatory. Editor Richard here for one last time, I promise, for quite a few months. I just wanted to mention I had an email this morning from the Radio Academy, the 30 under 30 meet the class of 2022. And these the the ones to watch in the radio and podcast industry the list as the email says the list features 30 exceptional individuals who've shown they're on a trajectory trajectory i can't speak uh to lead our industry into a bright and bold future they probably can say trajectory demonstrating passion skill and a deep understanding of the media. And on that list, of course, is the Honourable Izzy Clark,

senior producer, presenter, and author, Fresh Air Production, and the Supermassive Podcast. Oh, thank you. That's so, so nice. High five, Izzy. Well done, Izzy. That was amazing. Yeah, I'm really, really very chuffed to be on that list. So yeah, thank you. It's very exciting.

So send Izzy all of your congratulations as well because it is incredible. Also tweet us your favorite parts of our book, The Year in Space. What do you like the most from it? Let us know. It's at Royal Astro Sock on Twitter or you can email any questions you have

for future podcasts that we might be recording to podcast at ras.ac.uk and we'll try and cover them in a future episode. Until then though, happy stargazing.