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Dec. 6, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:43
Edition 232 - New Lunar Mission

Exciting news about a new Moon mission from one of the top ESA scientists working on it - DrJames Carpenter...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your communications and donations, which have been sent to me via our website, theunexplained.tv and the website designed, created, maintained and owned by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
If you can make a donation, especially at this time of year, to help this work continue into 2016, then I will be grateful to receive it.
Follow the link from the website, theunexplained.tv.
And Ditto, follow the message link if you want to send me an email, all at theunexplained.tv.
That's the website.
Please put a hit on that website, no matter how you're hearing this show.
The special guest on this edition is somebody who's involved in a real-life moon mission that's happening five years from now.
It's a cooperative venture between the European Space Agency, the Russians and the Americans all working together to do something that I think is pretty exciting.
I first heard about this on domestic BBC radio back in October, and I was determined to get one of the ESA scientists involved on here.
So it's taken a couple of months to do, but I'm delighted to say that I've got senior scientist Dr. James Carpenter from his office in Amsterdam at the European Space Agency on this edition of The Unexplained, talking about, I think, one of the most exciting space missions ever.
That's coming very soon.
But before I do that, and still talking about the moon first off, let's look at some of your emails.
A few shout-outs here.
Jason Bradley in the UK says, Marcus Allen, the UK editor of Nexus magazine who was on the last edition, Jason says, I found his knowledge of the Apollo missions to be pretty flimsy.
Marcus, you might remember, has researched whether or not we went to the moon for 20 years, and after 20 years of research, he says he doesn't think we actually did.
David in Ontario, Canada, on the same theme, says, one of the things that would prove whether or not the moon missions actually happened, and he believes they did, would be to talk to and listen to some of the amateur radio operators' traffic from during that time.
That would prove that those communications were monitored, so they must have happened.
Okay.
David in Ontario says it nullifies any opinion other than the truth of the landings.
Away from all of that, but another controversial subject, the subject of terrorism and the terrible attacks recently in Paris.
Interesting email from Mark at Warwick, United Kingdom, just basically starting off by saying I wanted to explain the reactions of the, quotes, conspiracy types regarding the disbelief of the events as told us by the mainstream.
A lot of people have said to me, a lot of emails I've had, saying, you know, you talked to a mainstream scientist, a mainstream researcher about radicalization and all the rest of it, when really you should have been asking for the story behind all of this.
And I said, and I think I stand by this too, that the time for getting into the conspiracy theories and all the rest of that is when perhaps the events of what happened in Paris a few weeks ago are a little less raw than they are now.
But I will do them.
In fact, I've got one guest already lined up on a similar theme.
So watch this space or listen to this space.
Josh in Toronto says Howard Hughes, you are the man.
Thank you.
Says you light us up like Christmas trees.
Don't stop.
Very poetic, Josh.
Thank you for that.
James Sclar in the United States.
Good to hear from you.
James, thank you for the fabulous photographs of your location in Massachusetts.
I knew nothing about Massachusetts, but your photographs show me it's very beautiful.
Kind comments from Derek in London.
Good to hear from you.
Stephen, thank you for your email.
Roddy here in the United Kingdom says that I was a listener to the radio station The Unexplained used to be on back in those days.
It was a more balanced listening medium in those days than it is now.
Around the beginning of February this year, I made a conscious decision to switch off my radio in my truck because nothing on air could stimulate me any longer.
I also stopped buying newspapers.
So interesting, Roddy doing something that a lot of us have done.
He started to follow the non-mainstream media and has decided to turn his back on a lot of the mainstream output, which I have to say I consume less mainstream media than I did.
You know, I work for part of my week in it, so I have to be consuming it then.
And I do keep an eye on the news here, but I don't actually consume as much mainstream media as I used to.
I certainly don't watch as much television as I did.
That was Roddy in the UK.
He's a trucker.
Another trucker, Zach in California, asks me a nuts and bolts question about making donations to the show.
Can I send a donation through regular mail?
I'm going to have to investigate that.
But I promise you, Zach, if you have the concerns that I have about internet security, the PayPal donation system that we've got here is absolutely secure.
So please don't worry about that.
And your details don't go anywhere else.
Josh Carrera in Colorado, USA, good to hear from you.
Frederick in Sweden, a good guest suggestion, Frederick, nice to know that you're there.
60 degrees north.
And Sue Brooke, finally.
Sue's a regular listener.
Sue in York.
Nice to hear from you, Sue.
Heard me mention that I had some more problems with my tinnitus recently.
And she says, please just read up on Pelagonium or invest less than £10 and see if it works for you too.
She thinks it can help.
Thank you, Sue.
As soon as I can get down to the health shop and do that, if I get a moment in my life, I'm going to do that and give it a try.
And it's really kind of you to have thought of me.
If you want to get in touch with me, like I say, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Now, I was captivated a couple of months ago when I turned on BBC Radio 4, the main evening news program there called PM.
And a show like that can only ever give every subject three, possibly a maximum four minutes.
So when they talked about a new moon mission, which involves partly the European Space Agency, I knew that they could literally and metaphorically only scratch the surface, which is why I wanted to get in touch with the scientist they talked to.
His name is Dr. James Carpenter, and after two months of trying, he's here now from the headquarters of the European Space Agency.
The office is in Amsterdam, Holland.
And we're going to talk about a lunar mission that is planned for 2020, which will be a joint European Space Agency and Russian cooperation, which is going to do some utterly fascinating stuff.
So, with a little luck, we're going to cross to a working office.
So, you will hear office-type sound effects in the background, but I don't think they're going to be too off-putting.
Let's talk now to Dr. James Carpenter at the European Space Agency.
James, thank you very much for making time for me.
Tell me about you and what you do at ESA.
My name is James Carpenter.
I work in the Human Space Flight and Operations Directorate at the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC in the Netherlands.
And I work as part of the Lunar Exploration Team.
And we are a team looking at future missions to the Moon, robotic initially, then looking forward to preparing the next lunar human missions, which we think will come next.
And within that team, I'm responsible for the science and the payload aspects of the work that we do.
Very exciting.
Explain to me why now the interest in the moon.
I know that you did some interviews on domestic British radio, and I think that was one of the points that they put to you, because a lot of ordinary people in the street here who are not scientific and perhaps not quite as interested as you and I believe that our involvement and interest in the moon ended when the last Apollo mission finished.
Well, I think the 1960s and 70s were really a golden era for lunar exploration, and an awful lot happened in that period.
And certainly I think the pinnacle of this were the Apollo missions, where really it was something that was just remarkable.
And the scientific return from those missions was really transformative in terms of our understanding of the solar system, of the moon, of our own planet, of very, very, of everything that we really understand about how planets form and evolve and about the history of the solar system is derived in some way from the work that was done on those early missions.
I was a small boy when all that happened.
I'm guessing that you're somewhat younger than me.
Yeah, so I'm rather younger than that.
I wasn't alive when the Apollo missions happened.
So for me, it's really a piece of history.
But something that then nothing much happened for quite a long time.
But then during the late 90s, some new missions started to return to the moon.
And then in the 2000s up to now, we've seen really a resurgence of interest and lots of new orbital missions, which have created new data sets, giving a really a global picture of the moon.
And this has really helped to put a lot of the work that was done during the Apollo and lunar era in context.
And at the same time, researchers are going back to the samples that were returned during the Apollo and lunar missions and analyzing them in more detail using new technologies, new instruments, some of the new capabilities that really didn't exist back in the 70s and 80s when a lot of this early work was done.
And all this together is showing us that we have barely scratched the surface of what the moon has to tell us.
And we now know that the samples that were returned during the Apollo missions and the lunar missions were from a fairly unique region on the surface of the moon.
We're also discovering that the moon is really a much more dynamic and strange and alien place than we'd imagined.
And it's opened up a whole lot of new questions for us.
So if you pick a couple of the really, perhaps the hot topic quite recently has been the observation that there is water ice at the poles of the moon trapped in the cold conditions there,
but also that there is actually water across the whole of the surface of the moon and that this water, it appears, is being created all the time through interactions between the surface of the moon and the solar wind, which comes back from the sun.
Excuse me, my phone is playing.
You have a very appropriate ring term.
The moon is very dynamic, but also the whole history of the moon and the earth system has been, the way that this evolved has also been challenged by some of the discoveries that have been made recently in lunar samples.
And so there's just a tremendous amount that's being looked into now in terms of the scientific aspects.
But then also internationally, we see a resurgence of interest for perhaps reasons that aren't so science-driven, but are more about the fundamental need to explore.
So we see the Chinese who've had a number of missions to the moon, orbital missions, and have recently had a mission to the surface.
They're planning further surface landing missions, including a sample return mission in 2017.
We see the emergence of the private sector and interest there.
And a number of other agencies around the world are also now looking at the moon as the next destination for them.
And in terms of what comes after human exploration of low Earth orbit, what is the next step beyond ISS?
I think a number of agencies are looking to the moon's surface and to the space around the moon as being the place that we would look to next for exploration.
So there seems to be a convergence occurring at the moment of interests, both scientific from agencies and from the private sector.
And also, I'd say from the general public, we see a tremendous interest in these elements, these aspects.
So I think we're on the verge of something new starting.
This is a modern day space race by the sounds of it, James.
So what you're saying basically is that we have the ISS and we have for many years now and that's served us well.
But in the long term, if we want to achieve more and perhaps reduce the costs and a lot of these things come down to cost, what better than using a great big solid lump of rock that's already there as your base?
Something like that.
I think that with the firstly, I think the International Space Station is a quite remarkable thing, and I think we sometimes it's become almost routine to think about the fact that we have a permanent human settlement off-world.
And this is something I remember before the space station was there, how exciting that prospect was.
And now it's there.
We think we are learning a huge amount about how to live and work in space, but also how to work together.
And I think that's really one of the key things for me that's come out of the ISS and looking forward to how we move forwards is how we work together as an international community to do extraordinary things.
And one of the fantastic things about the moon as a destination for human exploration is it's a great place to take the lessons that we've learned in low Earth orbit and then to take those to the next step and learn really what it means to live and work on another planetary body.
And we can get experience there and knowledge there of how to do that that we can take forward to other destinations in the solar system.
Right.
I just want to explain to my listeners around the world that I think you're in a busy office, somebody's typing in the background.
That's the noise that they can hear.
That is correct.
It sounds like somebody's using a keyboard.
But that's an office environment for you.
Okay.
What is it?
You say that this is a cooperation.
You're cooperating with the Russians.
What is that like?
It's tremendous fun, actually.
Yes, so I mean, there is a long history of ESA and Russia working together in space.
It's happened and continues to happen on a number of projects.
So now ESA and Roscosmos are working together closely on Mars exploration through ExoMars and are now working together on these lunar missions.
So you said ExoMars.
Yeah, so ExoMars is a joint Russian-European mission to go to Mars.
The first mission is an orbiter mission, the Tracegas orbiter with an entry, descent and landing demonstrator, which will be going in 2016.
And then there's another mission later on after that, which would be a lander mission with a rover.
Exciting stuff.
Where does this leave America?
Well, the US is also a partner with ESA for lunar exploration in the sense that ESA is working on the multi-purpose crew vehicle, MPCV, with NASA.
So this is a NASA project, but ESA is providing the service module for that.
And so in that, we're also, ESA is part of the human transportation capability to deep space.
This explains then in a way that we had enormous problems back in the 1960s and 1970s funding this.
The cost of the lunar exploration program was its ultimate undoing, unfortunately, the reason that it had to be stopped because the money ran out.
But if you do it in tandem with various other nations and everybody has a little slice of this, then it becomes much easier.
Yeah, so I think that pretty much everybody recognizes that there's tremendous benefit to be had from working together, from pooling expertise, experience, resources, technologies, and the interests to coordinate the way that we work together to achieve things that independently we would find very difficult.
So certainly, I mean, ESA is, I think, one of the things which remarkable about the European Space Agency is it's fundamentally about international cooperation.
So ESA is a large number of European countries working together in a coordinated way to do very complicated, very difficult and quite wonderful things.
And I think this becomes a broader thing for exploration where I think all agencies are now interested in understanding how we can pull resources to explore.
And so for that reason, there's a group called the International Space Exploration Coordination Group, or ISEG.
And this is a meeting point of, I think now, 15 agencies to discuss plans and aspirations and to try and coordinate our independent work in a way that allows us to support each other in our goals and endeavours.
And one of the major or the major product of this group is something called the Global Exploration Roadmap, which is a high-level overview of the plans and aspirations of all these different agencies presented in a way which allows people to see what each other are wanting to do and to coordinate.
So James, you obviously have a work schedule there, and I'm very grateful to you for making time in your office there to talk with me today.
Presumably then, with this great coordinated effort, you're able to go onto a central hub somewhere and you can see where your counterparts in the different armatures of this, you know, what stage they're at and what they're working on today?
To some extent, I think it's true that we should have some sort of great repository where all information on everything everybody's doing goes.
But there is a document which is published, which is called the Global Exploration Roadmap.
And if you just Google Global Exploration Roadmap, you will find it.
It's a document which is, I think, pretty readable for most people.
And this gives, I think, a very good overview or a snapshot of the global plans of the different agencies seen as a kind of a single entity at the point where that was published.
It's a dynamic thing.
So the Global Exploration Roadmap, there's a number of different versions that are published every few years.
So there have been two versions that have been published so far.
The next one, I think, will probably come out in around 2017, something like that.
And with each of these, I think it's a good opportunity to see how things have evolved and where things are going.
And also, I think, to see how it's really, I think it can be truly said that there is a very significant level of coordination going on between agencies in the way that they're planning activities.
Well, there's so much dissent and disunion down here on Earth.
It's really nice to know that we're cooperating in space.
Before we talk about the specific mission, which is what we're here to talk about, of course, I just want to ask you about the moon itself.
I talked about the public perception of the moon, what ordinary people think about it.
And, you know, a lot of people think that it's this great lump of dead grey dust.
Because, frankly, after the Apollo missions, that's what we were told.
But there is much more to it, as you say, the discovery of water, which was discovered, I think, quite by chance initially.
Very, very exciting.
And, you know, as you said yourself, it sheds whole new light on what use this satellite of ours can be and what it is actually all about.
Okay, so I think there's a lot that you can talk about in terms of the moon, but I think one thing that's come about recently is we've really started to understand that what we understand from the Apollo missions and from the samples and from the measurements that were made during this era is really very limited in what it can tell us because it's from a really very specific area of the moon.
So there's a few key things that I would touch on.
The first would be the moon, actually because it's a, if you like, a fairly dead world in sort of the geological sense, is very different from the surface of the Earth or the other terrestrial planets.
So the surface of the Earth is constantly changing.
The surfaces are being transformed, they're being changed all the time.
So you don't get any sight of the very, very ancient Earth.
The surface of the Moon has not really changed very much in 4 billion years.
And so it has seen everything that has happened in the inner solar system during that period and has recorded it.
So by going to the moon, you can observe the history of the inner solar system over the last 4 billion years or so.
And that's actually really important.
So it's a time capsule.
It's a time capsule for solar system history and in that, the history of the Earth itself.
So one major, I think probably a great example of that is the impact history of the inner solar system.
So there's just someone coming to the door.
And we do have to explain to my listeners that this is a working office at the European Space Agency in Amsterdam, Holland.
So, you know, people are pretty busy.
Yeah, so my apologies for that.
That's fine.
So during the Apollo era, the rocks that were collected were dated, looking at the ratios of different radioisotopes that were in the rocks.
And these ratios tell you how old these rocks are.
And what this showed was that several billion years ago, there was a very, very high flux, lots and lots of large impactors hitting the Earth and the Moon.
And over time, the number fell and fell and fell.
And then there was a spike, a big spike in the impactors.
And the large number came in was a fairly short period of time, geologically speaking.
And then this tailed off again.
And when we look at the moon today, we see these very, very large craters, which we call basins.
And these basins were formed by these giant impacts that happened during this spike.
Now, this spike also seems to be very, very important because it seems to coincide with the first observed traces of life on Earth.
And it may or may not be connected somehow with the emergence of life on Earth.
Right.
So if you're saying that the moon was pelted by, I'm sorry to interrupt, but all this stuff that during this great spike period spattered it.
If the Earth was also pelted with those things, some of the ingredients of what was contained in what was impacting the moon and the Earth could have contained the ingredients for life.
So it could have been the ingredients of life were delivered, or it could also have been the actual process of the impacts themselves could have somehow led to surface chemistry on the Earth, which could have led to life.
So if that happened on Earth, and this is all hypothesis, I know, and a lot of exploration has to be done before we can say this, definitely.
But if that was the effect that it had on Earth, why didn't it do that on the Moon?
Well, there is, well, firstly, the chemistry that exists on the surface of the Moon would have been different.
The environmental conditions on the surface of the Moon are different.
So I don't think we could have expected life to have emerged on the Moon.
It's entirely possible that the chemical building blocks of life, if they were delivered to the Earth by this mechanism, could also have been delivered to the Moon.
But I'm not sure we would necessarily be able to observe those now because they would have been exposed to space for long periods of time and they would have changed.
But certainly if we look at what we call the volatile chemistry that exists on the surface of the moon, we see evidence of chemistry which has been put in place by impactors.
So we know that some of the carbon, the nitrogen and things like that, oxygen, that are on the surface of the moon have been put there by impacts, by things, and also delivered to the surface by the solar wind.
But then that actually links into one of the other kind of, I guess, very new things that's happened, which is the understanding of what we call volatile chemistry on the moon.
And there are two aspects to this.
The first is there's long been this idea that in the polar regions of the moon where it's very, very dark and very, very cold, you could collect and preserve water, ice and other volatile chemistry.
And this is important chemistry because it's this kind of thing that you find in comets.
It's the stuff which forms the building blocks of life.
And so actually, I think the earliest reference to this that I've seen was in a Nature paper in 1892, I think.
So it's a very old idea.
But the first observations of this were really made from orbit by a mission called Lunar Prospector, which measured neutrons from orbit and observed that in an energy range that we call epithermal, we see fewer neutrons in orbit over the poles than we see elsewhere.
And this is a great diagnostic to show that there's hydrogen present in the surface, and that's consistent with the idea There's water ice there.
And then there have been a number of other measurements made, but then perhaps the most exciting one was the LCROSS mission, which impacted into a permanently dark crater in the south polar region in 2009.
And the plume that it blew out of that crater was observed.
And this was the mission that showed us the moon rang like a bell, which nobody expected.
Right.
And so I think the key result from that was the observation that there was water in that plume and water ice was present in these dark regions.
Around the same kind of time, some observations were made by the M-Cubed instrument on the Indian Chandrayaan orbiter.
And M-Cubed is a NASA instrument that was on an Indian mission.
And that instrument observed in the infrared and observed an absorption in the infrared spectrum at around three microns, which was indicative of the oxygen-hydrogen bond.
And that oxygen-hydrogen bond was observed across the surface, everywhere, especially near the polar regions.
And that was a bit of a surprise, as it indicated there was some kind of veneer of water across the whole of the lunar surface.
Though there were other instruments on other missions that had made these observations in the past, so the Cassini mission and its flying past the moon had made these measurements some years before, as had the Deep Impact mission.
And then when researchers went back to those data sets, they observed the same thing, that there was evidence in the spectra they got of this water veneer across the surface of the moon, which was increased towards the poles.
And what we think is happening is that hydrogen in the solar wind is hitting the surface, bonding with the oxygens in the minerals there.
And then this forms OH, which can then be evolved into water.
And this water can be hop off the surface as it's heated by the sun and migrate towards the polar regions where you would tend to find this accumulation because it's colder there and it can stick to the surface for longer until eventually it could possibly become trapped in these cold dark craters.
And so what's interesting would be to understand if this volatile material and this water ice that's in these regions, where it comes from, if it's all from the solar wind or if some of it comes from impacts by asteroids and comets and what it can tell us about these potential building blocks of life in the solar system,
but also some of the reactions that would take place inside these ices as it's exposed to the space environment and cosmic radiation could also tell us something about how the more complex chemistry of life can be created.
So now I completely understand why you're going to the South Pole, because this whole story is there in capsule form.
That is where it's all agglomerated.
So this, yeah, it all kind of accumulates in the South Polar region.
But also if you're thinking forward from an exploration perspective of what's going to happen next, how can the moon become a stepping stone into the rest of the solar system?
This water ice becomes very exciting because water ice, if it's there in large quantities, can be a source of hydrogen and oxygen, which can be useful for life support, but they can also be propellant, which can take you from the surface of the moon onto other destinations in the solar system, or perhaps create some kind of a fuel station, either on the moon or in near lunar space that you could use for transportation around the solar system.
So going there is important for two reasons.
Partly to answer some questions about the possibility of life and what that water ice means.
But also, there's a very practical reason for being there because it could be the springboard, the slingshot base for you to go and explore elsewhere.
Absolutely.
So in some ways, it's kind of the perfect meeting point of fundamental science and exploration enabling things to make it a very, very attractive place.
The other thing that the polar regions also have are sites where you have near constant solar illumination.
So next to these dark craters, which are cold and contain water, ice and other volatile chemistry that could be of use for the future, we find peaks.
And these peaks are, because they're in the poles, the sunlight is very, very close to the horizon and almost never sets.
So a few times, several times a year, it will duck behind the horizon.
But for most of the time you're there, the sun just moves around you.
And this means that you can have almost constant solar power.
And so you have a, I guess, a perfect mix of permanent solar power or near-permanent solar power right next to a source of consumables and propellant.
So this is why it's really looked upon as a potentially very, very interesting place for future exploration.
So how much of this mission then is going to be pure science and understanding what you find?
And how much of it is pathfinding for a base there?
I think that it's a wonderful mix of the two.
So the Lunar Resource Mission, which is a Russian mission that we are supporting as a junior partner, the Lunar Resource Mission is, I think, a wonderful mixture of science and exploration.
So it's making measurements that I think are of fundamental scientific interest in terms of understanding what we find in that location and understanding the environment.
But those measurements, those same measurements are also very, very useful from the perspective of planning future exploration.
And our contribution to that mission is a precision landing and hazard avoidance capability, which we call PILOT, which will allow the mission to get to very precise locations to be able to make those measurements in the best possible place to go.
And also a package which will drill into the surface, take samples of water ice and the regolith, the rock and dust that we find in the surface, and we'll then be able to make an analysis of that to find out what it can tell us scientifically, but also what it can tell us in terms of the exploitation and utilization potential of that area.
So potentially the mix of the two.
your bit of this is the most important because you're not going to do anything on the moon if you crash into it or you land in the wrong place.
So, the bit that you're adding to it is a mechanism by which you will find the right place.
I think it's a very important part of it.
I don't think it's possible to say it's the most important part of it.
I think that it's building the lander is a very important part of it.
And if you have a precision landing system that doesn't have a lander, then you're in trouble.
So, I think we have a great combination of capabilities and interests between Russia and ourselves, which I think come together to make a very powerful and very exciting mission.
When Apollo 11 went there the first time, the lunar lander, the lunar module, was going to land in one particular area.
Then they found that it had unexpected hazards and they had to use probably more fuel than they should have done to drift on a bit and land in a better area.
And they only had one shot at doing that.
Do we know more about the location now?
Because we've got much better analysis, much better telescopes and everything, and we've been there a number of times before.
Do we know more than, you know, do we have more information at our fingertips than they would have had for that landing?
I think we have quite extraordinary data sets available now.
So the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission, which is operating at the moon now and has been there since 2009, has produced an extraordinary quantity of data about the surface of the moon that has really been transformative for our understanding of it and for the way that it can be utilized, the way we might access it, as well as the amazing science that's coming out of that mission.
And so across the moon now, there are large areas where we have images at a resolution which is much better than a meter.
I mean, you probably would have seen, and if you look online, you can easily find images of the Apollo landing sites and the lunar landing sites.
At the Apollo landing sites now, we have images where you can see the footprints of the astronauts as they moved from the lunar landers to where they deployed instruments on the surface.
That's extraordinary, isn't it?
And gives the lie to some of those people.
You know that there are some people out there who still claim even now, some of them even more loudly than they did that we never went to the moon.
So here is evidence that we did.
Absolutely.
Now, of course, I think that some people really like to believe this stuff, and there is nothing you could ever do to convince them otherwise.
And anything you show them will only ever convince them more of what they thought was true anyway.
But for me, it's not really a discussion worth having.
So to be able to resolve what you're going to find there at that kind of depth, to be able to see something a meter or less across clearly, that gives you a very good idea of where you're going to go.
And if you've got a good idea of where you're going, that means that you can make a great head start when you get there.
Absolutely.
So now the polar regions, it's worth saying, are very, very challenging places to go anyway, because you have a very, very alien environment where the illumination conditions can be quite challenging.
And so for the mission, for the precision landing system that we're producing, we use a combination, we use images to provide a very, very precise navigation so we can get right to the point we want it to go to.
I'm sorry to interrupt, James.
Just to make this clear, you said about the illumination.
Is that this all-day sun thing that's a problem?
So you have the sun is very, very low to the horizon.
So you have very, very large areas which are in shadow.
And while you have these regions which are very small, which are near almost constantly illuminated, the majority of the polar regions moves from light into shadow.
And large parts of it will be in darkness at any one time.
And the shadows that are cast can be very, very long.
And actually interpreting what you're seeing in terms of surface topography can be fairly challenging.
So you've got to have sensors that have amazing, I don't know if this is the right term, but dynamic range.
Yes, we do.
We do.
But for the precision landing, we would use images during the orbital, as we're coming into land from quite far away during the orbital part to work out exactly where we are based on landmarks.
And then as we move closer to the surface and closer to the landing site, we would now identify surface features and use the relative motion of the spacecraft relative to those surface features to really hone in on these locations.
And as we approach the landing site that we've chosen, we have a LIDAR which uses lasers to scan the surface to identify boulders, craters, slopes, things that could be hazardous for the landing and create information that allow the onboard computer of the spacecraft to make decisions about whether it's safe to land or not.
And if not, then it can choose to make a maneuver to land somewhere nearby, which is safer.
That just sounds astonishing.
And will there be a mission control?
And if there will be a mission control guiding this, will you be in it?
I don't know if I will be in the actual mission control.
I suspect people who are perhaps better at that job than me will be actually in there controlling the spacecraft.
But the spacecraft will be, it's a Russian mission, so it will be controlled from Russia.
But I expect that the ESA teams will be very much involved in the operations.
And this isn't just something that will happen remotely and then report back to you after the fact.
That team in mission control in Russia will watch this thing just as the NASA people did, I'm sure with greater sophistication these days, but just as they did 40 odd years ago.
Well, I think we have the advantage on the moon that we are not on Mars.
We are very close by, so you can have near real-time information coming down.
And so that's a great advantage, I think, of going to the moon.
Amazing stuff to be involved in.
And talk to me about, I know That for the lunar missions back 45 years ago, whatever, they had to develop all sorts of new technology.
People always talk about the non-stick frying pan, and they developed Tefron for that, various other things, and special kinds of pens and all sorts of things, and alloys they had to invent specially.
Are you having to do that now to make the hardware for this?
Yes, so there is technology development for us.
So we are, in a large part, building on a lot of heritage.
So I think in Europe, we've been developing this precision landing and hazard avoidance technology for quite some years.
So it's really taking things which were technologies which we've been working for some time and now really taking them to the next level and getting them ready for flight and for operations.
For the drilling and sampling, we're building on the heritage of the Rosetta mission and of the instruments, the capabilities that are being built for the Examars Mars mission.
So it's a new scenario.
It's a challenging scenario.
But to a large part, we are building on a lot of work that's been done before.
So there are new elements, but we're not starting from scratch.
Unless I'm completely wrong, and do tell me if I am, I know you will.
L-Cross was the mission that showed us that the moon is hollow.
If you're drilling down into the surface, how far down can you go?
Can you go down to the empty bit?
I'm not sure the moon is hollow.
Right.
Because did it not, when something was crashed into the surface, there was a reverberation, wasn't there, that wasn't expected?
I must say I'm not entirely sure about the details of that.
So certainly there are seismic waves which run through the moon.
And for sure, I'm sure you'd see some resonance.
And these seismic waves actually, they tell us what the structure of the interior is.
So during the Apollo missions, there were a number of seismometers which were deployed all on the near side within a sort of fairly localized region.
And these seismometers detected moonquakes which were occurring.
And it's these which allowed us to understand what the interior of the moon was looked like.
But because they're all on the near side and fairly closely packed together, it's very difficult to see beyond a certain depth.
And so if you want to understand what the deep interior of the moon looks like, then you need to have a wider, dispersed array of seismometers around the surface of the moon in order to be able to look deep into the interior.
Going to the South Pole, which this mission, which I think is planned for 2020, isn't it, James?
I think that's right.
Going to the South Pole, and sorry for my layman's question, but presumably that allows you to turn your camera towards the Earth, and you can see us back there just like the Apollo astronauts did, but also flip it around the other way and look out into deep space from what would be the far side of the moon.
Is that right?
That's correct.
So the South Pole of the Moon, sometimes, if you're really on the South Pole, then sometimes the Earth is in view and sometimes the Earth disappears out of view.
When the Earth is out of view, the sky can become very quiet, particularly in radio.
So there are a pretty substantial community of radio astronomers that would very much like to be able to observe the sky from the far side of the moon.
And the lunar pole is perhaps a good first place to make these kinds of measurements.
Because when you observe the sky in long wavelength radio, from the far side of the moon, in this kind of radio quiet, you have the possibility to see for the first time, or map the sky for the first time, in a band which allows you to see what's called the cosmic dark ages, which is an era when the first cosmic structures were formed.
And this is something which has never been possible before because of the radio noise that comes from the Earth, both man-made and natural.
So literally, it's almost like, I mean, these days, if I want to listen to very distant radio stations, sadly here in London, I can't do that anymore because of the amount of Wi-Fi hash, electric light rubbish that's being emitted.
It's just not possible.
If I want to do that, I have to take my radio set out into the country and try and get pure conditions.
It is the astronomical version of that, really, that you'd be doing.
Yes, yes.
And if you're an astronomer, then you can't, it's very difficult to do good astronomy from the city, which is why you take your telescopes and you put them out on Hawaii or in La Palma, somewhere like that, somewhere you're far from city lights and nice and high in the sky away from sort of light pollution and from aberrations of the atmosphere.
And the far side of the moon for long wavelength radio is like going to Hawaii.
Well, it sounds enormously exciting.
Living on the moon, a lot of people have been talking about perhaps building a domed structure of some kind and actually people living on the moon.
Do you foresee that happening?
Is that what ESA, the European Space Agency, is planning towards now?
I think that we would say, Dave, that the next destination for human exploration will be lunar space, and we have aspirations for human missions to the surface of the moon.
And I think that if you speak with any agency that's talking about this, it's clear that this has to be done in a sustainable way.
I don't think we're going to have, if you like, permanent cities on the moon or anything like that anytime soon.
But I would personally be very interested in seeing Antarctica-like research stations on the surface of the moon that could be coordinated internationally.
And so I think that we will see a sustained human presence at the surface of the moon in an analogue to the Antarctica case, where we see humans living and working, doing research and working together in the very, very challenging environment.
And I think that we'll see that probably in the because of the chemical structure that we already know about, and because of the gases present, presumably it might be possible to generate breathable oxygen.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's two ways that one could consider doing that.
One is using water ice, if it's present in sufficient quantities in the lunar polar regions.
The other way is actually just to pull it straight out of the rocks and the regolith, this rocky, dusty blanket that's across the whole of the surface.
So the moon, the minerals on the moon are around 40% oxygen.
So it's certainly possible to take that oxygen out of those minerals and to use that oxygen as a consumable for life support.
The main ingredient that you need to be able to do that is energy.
And energy from the sun is abundant at the surface of the moon.
So it's certainly something which one could consider doing.
And there's a pretty significant effort and has been a pretty significant effort to find ways that that could be done.
An interesting byproduct of a lot of these processes, the chemical processes that would do this, are metals and other materials that could actually also be useful.
Which are there?
Yes, yes, which are there.
So I think a key thing of a sustainable lunar exploration program in the future will be understanding how to live off the land, how to use the resources that we find there to provide for our needs when we get there.
And so I think a big part of this early phase that we're talking about now, going back there with robotic missions and the first human missions, will be about learning how to live and work in a sustainable way with the materials that have been given to us at the surface of the moon.
And through that, learning how to do this so that we can take those skills onto other solar system bodies in the more distant future.
So the world has been looking, and we've been captivated recently with all the talk about Mars.
Everybody's really excited about Mars.
People are in capsules trying to learn to live together in ways that they might have to for long periods on Mars.
But actually, perhaps from what you've been saying at ESA, the biggest excitement is much, much closer to home, and that's much more realizable within a time span that we can envisage.
Well, I think if you look at the Global Exploration Roadmap, which is this document, this vision of what can happen in the coming years with 15 agencies involved in that now, what you see is the focal point of that roadmap are sustainable human missions to Mars.
And so this, I think, is a shared goal for, I think, pretty much all agencies are sustainable human missions to Mars.
And so there's a lot of work going on to try and understand how we can do that.
But the moon has a major role to play on the way there and is in of itself a quite extraordinary place to go, to explore, to learn, and to get ready for those later steps, which I think will probably happen in a slightly longer timeframe than a human return to the moon.
When do you think there'll be people on the moon?
Well, I think a target that you would see in the global exploration roadmap and which has been talked about are human missions to the surface of the moon in the 2030 timeframe.
So we could live to see this.
That's very exciting.
Well, I certainly hope so.
I certainly hope that I will live to see it.
And I think that we will see human missions to deep space during the 2020s.
We'll see human missions going beyond low Earth orbit and taking the first steps towards human missions to other destinations, to the moon and to Mars.
So one of the big jobs you guys at ESA have, it seems to me, one of the big tasks you've got, is to try and get the mainstream media, and you know, I have one foot in the mainstream media because I work there for some of my week, get their attention off Mars and somehow try to persuade them that actually the moon is what we need to be talking about.
And because this mission is, what, five years away, we need to be talking about the moon very, very soon.
I don't think we need to take people's attention off Mars.
Mars is a fantastic place.
No, no, but we need to get people's attention on the moon, yeah?
Yes, well, I think people's attention, well, I think people's attention is on Mars, there's been a lot of Mars missions and there's been some just quite extraordinary things that have happened there and it's well deserved.
I think that as things will start to happen on the moon, there'll be more and more exciting things to look at.
And certainly my own experience has been whenever we have done anything relating to lunar exploration, whether it's in a public context or a media context or even in a scientific context, the level of interest always exceeds expectations.
So I think just my anecdotal experience is that there is a tremendous public appetite for this.
And when people see what is happening and what is likely to come, I am very confident there'll be tremendous interest.
Especially as from my generation, I wasn't there the first time this happened.
And so people say we've been to the moon before.
I didn't.
And most of the people that I work with didn't.
So I think that this is very exciting, but it's also very new because the way this will happen will be very different from last time.
It will not be as fast.
It will not be as it won't be single shots.
It'll be a sustainable development of an infrastructure and a capability that will see this become a more permanent thing that we can do together as an international community.
So it's a much more sensible approach to things.
It's not a big headline grabbing wham-bam thing.
This is a progression.
It is.
It is.
And it has to be.
I think this very unique set of circumstances that allowed Apollo to happen are unlikely to happen again.
And if they did, again, I'm sure we would find it would be unsustainable.
So if sustainability is what we want, if we want to become really a spacefaring in the longer term, then we have to do this in a systematic and sustainable way, consistent with the kind of budgets and resources that we can expect.
You've got to get banged for the buck, literally.
I interviewed on this show five years ago, Edgar Mitchell, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who, of course, walked on the moon.
I think he was Apollo 16.
Neil Armstrong, of course, sadly died recently.
But I wonder, have you been getting input from the guys who actually went there?
As far as you know, anyway.
Not in a technical sense.
I certainly have had indirectly received feedback that they are interested in some of what we're doing, but they're interested.
Many of them are interested in what the future holds for lunar exploration.
Because I just wonder, I'm sure I read somewhere that one of them, at least, was a little bit impatient that we actually hadn't gone back there.
And so that would, what you're about to do is answering that particular thirst, desire, hunger.
I hope so, but I can also, I work with people, I don't work with the moonwalkers, but I do work with people who were involved in the Apollo missions.
And I think at that time, there was such a tremendous excitement and such a sense of optimism and anticipation of the extraordinary things that were to follow.
I think the following 40 years were quite frustrating.
And so I think we're only, but I think Apollo had just happened before its time.
I think the world is only just starting to catch up with that.
I think you're dead right.
And I think maybe part of it, and I'd like to know what you think about this, part of it perhaps was that last time around there was a lot of politics involved.
It was a race with the Russians.
Everybody was out there to stake national pride.
This time, we're doing it together.
I think that's the only way it will happen is by working together.
And certainly everything seems to indicate that we're on track to find a way to do that.
And I think one of the things when I look at something like the International Space Station and I see multiple nations cooperating together to do something which is extraordinarily and incredibly complex and that happening regardless of what is happening on Earth.
Well, indeed, the slightly tense relations with Russia at the moment, yes.
And so I find that that gives me tremendous optimism for us as a species that we're able to do this.
And I think that space will continue to have a very important role to play in fostering cooperation between all the nations of the world.
Would you like to go into space, James?
I would very much.
I would very much.
I'm not sure how good an astronaut I would be, but I would very much like to have the opportunity if it were given to me.
Is that something that if you wanted to, if you really, sounds like you do want to, if you really wanted to, you could move towards?
I mean, you're clearly young enough to do it.
I know and have known quite a number of astronauts, and I think I'm made of different stuff.
Well, I'm glad you answered the question before I asked it.
Thank you.
So if they're made of that stuff, what do they have?
Because I don't have it.
You say that you don't think you have it.
What do they have?
I think it's very difficult to put your finger on it.
I think there's a fairly long and comprehensive process to figure that out and to pull it out of people.
But certainly I can say that all these people are extremely smart, very competent, very considered and very slow to stress and just some quite remarkable people.
And not easily scared.
Absolutely not.
No, no.
Very calm in the face of all circumstances.
All right, blessing.
Fantastic people.
You've been massively kind to speak with me from your office.
And we've heard typing in the background just to tell my listener again, and that's because it's a busy working office.
And James Carpenter is a busy working man on a very important project.
Just very finally, James, when do they start testing?
I mean, you can't just do it, you know, say it's all ready.
We're going to send it right now.
There have got to be tests.
When do they start testing everything?
Well, we start testing straight away.
And so we're hoping to start the, well, we will be starting the, what we call the phase B activities for our contributions to this mission very soon.
We have already started testing, we call breadboards of the technologies.
And we'll be doing more and more testing every step along the way until in the year or two leading up to the mission.
We'll be really testing the hardware that we'll be flying on the mission to make sure it's going to do the job.
So some aspects of Apollo and other space missions have been, I won't say hit and miss, but there's been a certain amount of finger crossing and hoping for the best involved.
This sounds to me as if everything is going to be as thoroughly tested and known about before you do it.
And that makes it more comprehensively prepared, perhaps.
Well, I don't know if we can say we're more comprehensively prepared than anyone else, but there are very rigorous procedures, processes, and standards in place for the way that you do this work.
Because you're taking something and you're putting it in a very complex and unique environment where you expect it to do a job that no one's ever done before, in an environment where nobody's been before.
And you have to do everything you can to make sure it works when it gets there.
Of course, there are always unknowns, there are always uncertainties, and there's always risk, but it's our job to do everything we can to minimize that risk within the budget and the resources that are available to us.
And that's what we'll do.
And as a space scientist, when you're not at work, do you enjoy space fiction, movies, that kind of thing?
I do.
And do you sit there saying, that's not right, that can't happen?
They've got that wrong.
Yes, becoming a scientist killed science fiction for me, but I can still suspend belief sometimes.
So I think it was science fiction that got me interested in the subject in the first place.
And I continue to be very much a fan of good science fiction.
Did you see gravity?
I did.
I saw gravity and I thought, and look, I'm not a scientist, and I thought half of those things couldn't happen.
What did you think?
It took a, I think, a realistic idea and extrapolated it quite far.
A lot.
But I appreciate that there was a general point that that movie made about the hazards of space debris and the direction that things are going with regard to our local space environment that were actually very serious.
And I think it's good that some of these issues are actually brought into consideration.
I actually interviewed one of the consultants, a man from Southampton University who you may know, one of the consultants from that movie.
And he certainly opened my eyes and ears to the risks from this debris that we've got flying around our heads.
Absolutely.
And this idea is increasing, and over time it's going to be more and more difficult to get around this.
So large spacecraft like the space station regularly has to perform maneuvers to avoid coming into too close a proximity with pieces of space debris.
It's a constant hazard of living and working in low-Earth orbit.
Something to think about, as is the mission in 2020, the Lunar 27 mission, which is a cooperation with ESA and the Russians and the Americans as well.
Dr. James Carpenter at the European Space Agency in Amsterdam.
James, thank you very much, and I hope this wasn't too much of a trial.
That was enormous fun.
Thank you, Howard.
Dr. James Carpenter from the European Space Agency, and I'll put a link to them, of course, on my website, theunexplained.tv.
More great guests in the pipeline as we cruise towards the end of this year of 2015.
It just seems to have gone so quickly, doesn't it?
I hope that you're doing well wherever you are.
Thank you very much for all of your supportive words.
And if you have made a donation, thank you very much indeed.
The place to donate or send me comments, please tell me about yourself, where you're listening and how you use the show.
Place to do all of that is to go to the website theunexplained.tv and that website designed and created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
So until next we meet here on The Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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