Science Friday: Exploring Strange New Worlds Edition

Welcome to a very exciting edition of Science Friday! This week, explore the moon, Mars, and beyond. Help design the next lunar base, contribute to the 100-year starship project, volunteer for a one-way journey to Mars, and explore the edge of our own planet. All this and more plus our self-replicating gadget of the week: the MakerLegoBot.

Moon Has Enough Water to Sustain a Lunar Base
Results from the LCROSS impact into the lunar surface were released this week, and they hold some pretty spectacular and unexpected results. Scientists were shocked to learn that there was any amount of water on the lunar surface after the initial data came back from LCROSS, but now they have said that there is more than we ever imagined. NASA’s Centaur rocket carrying LCROSS crashed into a lunar crater called Cabeus, and upon impact it kicked up material containing about 5.6 percent water. That’s more than the Sahara Desert, which contains 2-3 percent. What’s more? The water was in the form of water-ice crystals (rather than being locked up within rocks). The moon seems to have its very own full-fledged water cycle. There may be sufficient water to separate into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen, and use the hydrogen for rocket fuel, said Anthony Colaprete, a planetary scientist for NASA. That means that the moon could be a useful launching point for missions to other more distant worlds like Mars and moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Map of water and other compounds on the lunar surface

NASA Announces ‘100-Year Starship’ Program
A NASA official said that “within a few years” scientists will unveil a prototype for a starship that can take humans between worlds. The new project, called the 100-Year Starship, is currently joint funded by NASA and DARPA. So far, NASA has contributed $100,000 and DARPA has given $1 million to the project. Obviously, that is not nearly enough to create a starship. But, Simon Worden, center director at the NASA Ames Research Center said that he hopes to entice a few billionaires to contribute. The project’s goal is to utilize new forms of propulsion such as using microwave power from a ground base to heat hydrogen propellants installed on an orbiting spaceship. “Anybody that watches the [“Star Trek”] Enterprise, you know you don’t see huge plumes of fire,” says Worden, “You don’t have to carry all the fuel. You use that energy from a laser or microwave power to heat a propellant. … I think that’s one way of getting off the world.”

Concept of ground-based microwave propellant system

To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars
For the chance to watch the sun rise over Olympus Mons, or maybe take a stroll across the vast plains of the Vastitas Borealis, would you sign on for a one-way flight to Mars? That is the idea being proposed in a new article in the Journal of Cosmology written by Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and Paul Davies of Arizona State University. In the article, “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars,” the authors write that while technically feasible, a manned mission to Mars and back is unlikely to lift off anytime soon — largely because it is a hugely expensive proposition, both in terms of financial resources and political will. And because the greatest portion of the expense is tied up in safely returning the crew and spacecraft to earth, they reason that a manned one-way mission would not only cut the costs by several fold, but also mark the beginning of long-term human colonization of the planet. The authors propose that volunteer astronauts would be re-supplied on a periodic basis from Earth with basic necessities, but otherwise would be expected to become increasingly proficient at harvesting and utilizing resources available on Mars. Eventually they envision that outpost would reach self-sufficiency, and then it could serve as a hub for a greatly expanded colonization program.

You can read the entire article on the Journal of Cosmology website.

Would you volunteer for the one-way trip of a lifetime?

Father and Son Send iPhone Into Space and Record Incredible Video
A father and son from Brooklyn, New York sent an iPhone into the stratosphere a few weeks ago to record a video of the earth’s curvature. The two spent eight months researching and testing their homemade craft, which was made of a weather balloon and a styrofoam case for the iPhone, before launching in Newburgh, NY. The phone apparently braved winds of 100 miles-per-hour and temperatures as cold as 60 below zero (the iPhone was smartly packed with hand warmers). The recorded video shows the phone reaching a height of 100,000 feet before the balloon burst, plummeting the contraption back to earth, where it landed 30 miles from the launch point, in a tree, where the father and son found it in the dark because of the iPhone’s LED light.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Gadget of the Week: Self-Replicating Lego Machine
Software engineer and lego maniac Will Gorman has created the MakerLegoBot, a fully automated machine built from legos that builds other stuff made from legos. With some modifications, the MakerLegoBot could, theoretically, build a copy of itself. “There is a recursiveness to this whole thing,” says Gorman. “I love the idea of self-assembly and the Star Trek replicator and I love Legos,” he says. “I wanted to bring those two worlds together.

#FollowFriday

If you are on Twitter, you know there are plenty of amazing people out there tweeting away. And, many of them are scientists! Every Friday I’ll be bringing you a new list of great scientists, techies, and trekkies to follow on Twitter. This week…

• @marsroverdriver: On a small red light in the night sky lives four hundred pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I tell that metal what to do, and it does it.
• @roddenberryprod: Roddenberry Productions. Where SciFi Begins.
• @NASAJPL: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages many of NASA’s robotic missions exploring Earth, the solar system and our universe. Tweets from JPL’s News Office.

Science Quickies
Not enough science for you? Here’s a warp-speed look at some more science tid-bits that are worth a look.

• Astronomers find weird warm spot on an exoplanet
• How the leopard really got his spots
• With this augmented-reality system be the basis for a real holodeck?
• Discovery Magazine Blog proposes an E.T. Bill of Rights

TrekMovie’s Science Friday is an homage the the great NPR radio show Science Friday. Science Friday® is a registered service mark of ScienceFriday Inc.