Moon design contest for NASA internships

Talented engineering students who have ideas on how future explorers might live on the moon could find themselves working at NASA as paid interns.

The 2010 NASA Moon Work engineering design challenge seeks to motivate college students by giving them first-hand experience with the process of developing new technologies. To participate in the contest, students will submit their original design for tools or instruments that can help astronauts live and work on the moon. Top-ranked students will be offered a chance to intern with a team from NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program.

The Exploration Technology Development Program develops new technologies that will enable NASA to conduct future human exploration missions while reducing mission risk and cost. The program is maturing near-term technologies to help enable the first flight of the Orion crew exploration vehicle and developing long-lead technologies needed for possible lunar exploration missions.

Winning Moon Work contestants also will have a chance to attend field tests conducted by the Desert Research and Technology Studies Program, managed by NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The program conducts annual tests of new technologies in landscapes that are close analogs of the moon and other harsh space environments.

Students should submit a notice of intent to enter the contest by Dec. 15. Final entries for the Moon Work challenge are due May 15, 2010. All entries must be from students at U.S. colleges or universities. Although non-citizens may be part of a team, only U.S. citizens may win NASA internships or travel awards.

For complete details and to enter the contest, visit: http://moonwork.larc.nasa.gov

LO2 & LCH4 Storage on the Lunar Surface

Barsi, Moder & Kassemi, NASA Glenn, Cleveland, OH
AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference

Currently NASA is developing technologies to enable human exploration of the lunar surface for durations of up to 210 days. While trade studies are still underway, a cryogenic ascent stage using liquid oxygen (LO2) and liquid methane (LCH4) is being considered for the Altair lunar lander. For a representative Altair cryogenic ascent stage, we present a detailed storage analysis of the LO2 and LCH4 propellant tanks on the lunar surface for durations of up to 210 days. Both the LO2 and LCH4 propellant tanks are assumed to be pressurized with gaseous helium at launch. A two-phase lumped-vapor computational fluid dynamics model has been developed to account for the presense of a non-condensable gas in the ullage. The CFD model is used to simulate the initial pressure response of the propellant tanks while they are subjected to representative heat leak rates on the lunar surface. Once a near stationary state is achieved within the liquid phase, a multi-zone model is used to extrapolate the solution farther in time. For fixed propellant mass and tank size, the long-term pressure response for different helium mass fractions in both the LO2 and LCH4 tanks is examined.

Download the (pdf) Study HERE.

International Partnerships and Interface Standards for Exploration

Kathy Laurini
ESMD/Directorate Integration Office
Constellation Associate Program Manager for
Lunar Formation

Presentation to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Programmatic Workshop on NASA
Lunar Surface Systems Concepts
February 25, 2009

Objective: Involve interested international agencies in a discussion of lunar surface system exploration scenarios and architectures in order to facilitate identification of interfaces benefiting from standardization andpossible contributions to multilateral exploration activity

Download the Presentation HERE.

As part of an ongoing collaboration, NASA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC) Space Enterprise Council (SEC) conducted a workshop on NASA Lunar Surface Systems (LSS) Concepts. The objective was to provide a status of NASA's lunar surface exploration architecture, to share results of recent innovative lunar concept studies, and to seek feedback from U.S. industry and other interested parties.

The workshop included briefings on NASA, industry, and university analyses performed for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) and Constellation Program (CxP), with particular emphasis on a recently completed suite of lunar surface study contracts administered by the Constellation Program's LSS Project Office.

Other presentations online HERE.

Mankind's secrets kept in lunar ark

Maurice Chittenden

The SUNDAY TIMES

IF civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.

According to Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the agency’s research department, the first flowers - tulips or arabidopsis, a plant widely used in research - could be grown in 2012 or 2015.

“Eventually, it will be necessary to have a kind of Noah’s ark there, a diversity of species from the biosphere,” said Foing.

Tulips are ideal because they can be frozen, transported long distances and grown with little nourishment. Combined with algae, an enclosed artificial atmosphere and chemically enhanced lunar soil, they could form the basis of an ecosystem.

The first experiments would be carried out in transparent biospheres containing a mix of gases to mimic the earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide given off by the decomposing plants would be mopped up by the algae, which would generate oxygen through photosynthesis.

The databank would initially be run by robots and linked to earth by radio transmissions. Scientists hope to put a manned station on the moon before the end of the century.

The databank would need to be buried under rock to protect it from the extreme temperatures, radiation and vacuum on the moon. It would be run partly on solar power. The scientists envisage placing the first experimental databank on the moon no later than 2020 and it could have a lifespan of 30 years. The full archive would be launched by 2035.

The information would be held in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish and would be linked by transmitter to 4,000 “Earth repositories” that would provide shelter, food, a water supply for survivors.

Nasa sees light

A Nasa satellite has detected radiation emitted trillionths of a second after the big bang, the closest humans have got to directly observing the explosion that created the universe, writes Jonathan Leake.

The pattern of radiation - at 13.7 billion years, the oldest light detected - shows how the universe expanded. The results give scientists the most detailed timeline on the evolution of the universe.

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