NASA Lunar Science Forum, July 16-18, 2013

When NASA's Lunar Science Institute was commissioned in 2008, the goal of establishing extended human activity on the Moon as a foundation for exploring Mars and beyond, was still official U.S. policy. The Vision for Space Exploration, borne out of the aftermath of the Columbia accident, was scrapped but much of the momentum set into motion a decade ago continues to pay huge dividends [Frassanito/NASA].

The NASA Lunar Science Institute has formally announced the 6th Annual NASA Lunar Science Forum will be held July 16-18, 2013 at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA.  This year's forum will feature sessions on in-depth scientific results from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS), and Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), as well as a status update on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission scheduled for launch in August 2013.  

Dedicated side-conferences for graduate students and young lunar professionals (LunGradCon and Next Generation Lunar Scientists and Engineers, NGLSE) will precede the LSF on July 13 and 14. Science sessions will focus on recent mission results and in-depth analyses of lunar science and exploration studies.  Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) program results will be interwoven among science topics as well.

Multiple meetings result in unfortunate overlaps, and this year’s LSF is occurring over the same time frame as the Eighth International Mars Conference in Pasadena.  Given the scientific and exploration synergies between the Moon and Mars, we recognize there may be individuals who would like to attend both meetings.  SOC chairs from both meetings will consult with this in mind, attempting to minimize the overlap in time of subjects that pertain to both the Moon and Mars. 

Additionally, the LSF will be broadcast in real time and archived on the lunarscience.nasa.gov website.

Abstracts will be accepted February 25 through midnight PDT April 26, 2013 HERE.

NLSI Forum 2013 logistical concerns will be addressed in the next formal announcement in March.

2012 Lunar Science Forum talks now online

Recorded sessions during the recently-held 2012 Lunar Science Forum have been uploaded and are now available online. 

The NASA Lunar Science Institute, at Moffett Field, California, made the widely anticipated announcement Sunday, July 29.

The 2012 NASA Lunar Science Forum was perhaps the best yet! If you missed the three-day meeting (July 17-19, 2012) at NASA Ames Research Center or if you just want to relive some of the best talks, the public Adobe Connect sessions are now available online at: http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/lsf2012/agenda

More than 300 scientists attended the fifth NASA Lunar Science Forum, sponsored by the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) at Ames Research Center. With data analysis from five U.S. spacecraft currently studying the Moon, plus several others that completed their missions in recent years, discoveries and advancements abound.

“The NLSI catalyzes collaborative research within and among its seven teams, but also strives to include and support the broader lunar science community in a variety of ways,” said Yvonne Pendleton, Director of the NLSI.

In his summary review of the conference, distinguished planetary scientist David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston said “We have made more progress in three years with the NLSI than was made in the previous 30 years of lunar studies, but a lot of questions remain unanswered that require a return to the lunar surface, using both robot and human explorers.”

In addition to discussing science results, the Forum attendees also focused their attention on the future. NASA officials praised the performance of the current NLSI and announced an expansion of the charter to allow additional emphasis on research that will support both science and exploration. In NASA organizational terms, this means a closer alliance between the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and the NASA Human Exploration and Operations Directorate (HEOMD).

The joint presentation at the Forum by NASA Associate Administrators John Grunsfeld (SMD) and William Gerstenmaier (HEOMD) outlined their rationale for the expansion of the Institute, providing insight into the new era of enhanced collaboration between science and exploration.

NLSI team sheds light on 'late heavy bombardment'

Tentative 'hard' evidence of 'late heavy bombardment' and lunar cataclysm surmised by NLSI team may have resulted from a shift in the positions of the outer planets "late" in the early history of our star system's formation, throwing smaller rocky airless bodies into new trajectories and raining into the inner solar system. Post-Lunar Cataclysm diagram of the Solar System [LPI/Marchi/Bottke/Kring/Morbidelli].

A team of NLSI researchers have discovered that debris that caused a "lunar cataclysm" on the Moon 4 billion years ago struck it at much higher speeds than those that made the most ancient craters. The scientists found evidence supporting this scenario by examining the history of crater formation on the Moon.

During Earth's earliest days, our planet and others in the inner solar system, including the Moon, experienced repeated impacts from debris that formed the building blocks of the planets. Over time, as material was swept up and incorporated into the inner planets, the rate of impacts decreased. Then, roughly 4 billion years ago, a second wave of impacts appears to have taken place, with lunar projectiles hitting at much higher speeds. This increase could reflect the origin of the debris, where main belt asteroids were dislodged and sent into the inner solar system by shifts in the orbits of the giant planets.

The team is composed of Simone Marchi, an NLSI postdoctoral fellow, William Bottke, the NLSI Team Lead at Southwest Research Institute, Columbia, Md., David Kring, the NLSI Team Lead at USRA's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and Alessandro Morbidelli from the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, France. Their research paper, “On the Onset of the Lunar Cataclysm as Recorded in its Ancient Crater Populations,” was recently published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Nectaris basin, surrounding impacts of the same age and
size may have formed from progenitors traveling at a
higher velocity than elsewhere [NASA/LMMP].

The scientists analyzed digital maps of the lunar surface to learn about its history. Their analysis shows that craters formed near the 860 km diameter Nectaris impact basin were created by projectiles hitting twice as fast as those found on more ancient terrains. This was represented by a subtle shift in crater sizes, with the crater themselves thirty to forty percent larger on average than those found in comparable populations with older craters. The scientists believe this can be best explained by an increase in the velocities of the projectiles that produced the younger craters.

The increase in velocities may indicate a change in the solar system when the craters were created. The analysis supports the "lunar cataclysm" hypothesis that the brief pulse of impacting objects 4 billion years ago was due to gravitational disturbances caused by the reorganization of the giant planets as their orbits changed. Nectaris, a crater close to the Apollo 16 landing site, appears to have recorded the spike in asteroid impacts during the "lunar cataclysm."

Determining the magnitude and duration of any impact cataclysm and testing that hypothesis is a top science priority for future exploration of the Moon, according to Scientific Context for the Exploration of the Moon  (2007) by the National Research Council's Space Studies Board.

When Apollo astronauts gathered rock samples from the Moon, many samples had ages dating back 3.9 to 4 billion years ago, suggesting an enhanced pulse of bombardment. If a bombardment of asteroids hit the Moon as theorized, there could be indicators left on the lunar surface that would help validate the theory. Detailed mapping by the United States Geological Survey has previously identified small regions of the lunar surface that might contain clues about the bombardment. The team re-studied those ancient surfaces and measured the sizes of the impact craters using new data obtained from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, an instrument on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) currently orbiting around the Moon.

“This is an exciting time for lunar research with LRO and other spacecraft providing so much new data,” said lead author Simone Marchi. “Collaborating with scientists of different disciplines allowed us to link these observational data to dynamical models to put new constraints on solar system history.”

The inferred increase in velocity seems to have occurred after the Moon’s largest impact basin was produced, the 2,500-kilometer-diameter South Pole-Aitken Basin, but before the formation of the largest lava-filled impact basins on the lunar nearside, visible from backyards around the world.

“It is fascinating that the surface of our own Moon records evidence of orbital changes in Jupiter and Saturn that took place so long ago,” said NLSI Director Yvonne Pendleton.

The onset of the lunar cataclysm as recorded in its ancient crater populations
Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volumes 325–326, 1 April 2012, Pages 27-38
Simone Marchi, William F. Bottke, David A. Kring, Alessandro Morbidelli

View Abstract 

Scientists Detect Dramatic Shift in the Energy of Impacting
Asteroids that Pummeled the Ancient Earth and Moon
Dr. Simone Marchi, NLSI Postdoctoral Fellow (USRA, February 27, 2012)

Interview with new NLSI head Yvonne Pendleton

"The moon has gone from questionably interesting to absolutely fascinating. It’s providing a laboratory, our nearest laboratory off-planet where we can go and actually explore and test."

Last month Dr. Yvonne Pendleton became director of NASA’s Lunar Science Institute at Ames Research Center in California.

"Because of the missions that have happened recently, especially LRO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , and LCROSS, the mission that impacted the moon and kicked up material that we are now analyzing, we’re understanding far more about the water and volatile materials on the moon. In many respects, the moon represents our history, our past, and also our future."

90 Second Interview:

Full 8 minute Audio & Text Summary @ Earthsky

Yvonne Pendleton new NLSI director at Ames

David Perlman
San Francisco Chronicle

Dr. Yvonne Pendleton
New NLSI director

Yvonne Pendleton, a pioneer astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, has been named director of the center's Lunar Science Institute, the space agency announced.

The institute leads teams of scientists both at Ames and across the nation and abroad whose research focuses on the moons of Earth and other planets of the solar system. Pendleton succeeds planetary scientist David Morrison, who has led the institute for three years and is an expert on asteroids whose paths carry them toward possible impacts on Earth.

Pendleton and her husband, Ames research astronomer Dale P. Cruikshank, are among a group of scientists whose discoveries of life's precursor chemicals in the icy hearts of comets have given rise to current theories on the origin of life on Earth. Those ideas hold that Earth's life - and possibly life on Mars, too - arose from the organic chemicals that those comets carried here from the most distant reaches of the solar system billions of years ago.

During her 31-year career as a NASA researcher, Pendleton has also served as chief of the Ames Space Science and Astrobiology Division.

Morrison was recently appointed director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at the independent SETI Institute in Mountain View. He will continue part time as senior scientist at the lunar research institute.

Pendleton's new appointment was announced Monday, the day before the third annual Lunar Science Forum at Ames.