Thanga and his group have sketched a system that may use photo voltaic panels and batteries to offer the facility to push temperatures inside a lava tube all the way 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 intention 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 could be passive,” Parenti stated. She identified that individuals 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 preserve 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 may 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 concept all of this makes these everlasting polar shadows perfect for such a undertaking, “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 among the ironic issues,” Thanga stated. “It’s close by Earth, however it’s maybe probably the most excessive locations in your complete 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 yr that plans to land on a ridge overlooking a polar shadow. However as NASA appears to discover these areas, Thanga identified, it’s attainable that we’d merely study extra about how laborious it’s to exist and function in that stage of chilly.
“Simply working in cryogenic situations, that’s not trivial in any respect,” Thanga stated. “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 have now a phenomenon known as chilly welding,” the place two items of steel fuse on contact.
Thanga argues that the extra smart 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 have now on Earth, albeit a lot colder, which supplies researchers and engineers an understanding of what to anticipate and methods to plan for it.
Very like 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 quicker and cheaper than the Worldwide House Station.
