moon

In the back alleys of the world’s capitals and in the ballrooms of presidential palaces exists a black market that preys on the imagination of some and the greed of others. These black-market items were neither carved nor painted; in fact, they are not of this Earth. They traveled 400,000 kilometers via six Apollo missions and three unmanned Soviet missions to and from the moon.

Government research and development has its limits: Time, money and bureaucracy can all hamper the timely progress of research. As a result, many federal agencies are looking to private companies to help drive new innovation and keep costs down — but it’s never that simple. Two current hot-button topics — returning humans to space and geoengineering — highlight a range of issues related to how private and public investment in science can coexist. This month, we focus on NASA.

Blogging on EARTH

Usually, NASA hopes its space probes land safely at their destinations. This morning, the agency was planning for a big explosion on the moon — all in the hopes of confirming the presence of water on our nearest neighbor.

The moon isn’t quite the bone-dry place scientists once thought; instead, its surface is covered in water, according to a landmark finding announced by scientists at NASA today.

Between 1969 and 1972, five Apollo missions installed seismic stations at their landing sites on the nearside of the moon. Because the moon was thought to be seismically dead, the instruments were left almost as an afterthought to detect meteor strikes. But from the time the stations were switched on until they were decommissioned in 1977, they recorded hundreds of internally generated moonquakes, some as strong as magnitude 5.5 on the Richter scale.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first step taken on the moon on July 20, 1969. Since that historic small step — which 600 million people around the world watched breathlessly — other space missions have captured headlines: NASA’s Space Shuttle program, the International Space Station, the intrepid Mars rovers. But none, perhaps, has had quite the impact on our imagination as the giant leap that Neil Armstrong took for mankind.

Lunar exploration is once again in full swing. Japan’s Kaguya and India’s Chandrayaan-1 satellites are currently in orbit around the moon. China’s Chang’e spacecraft, after a successful mission, has been intentionally crashed on the moon. And the United States’ Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is preparing to launch. These are all unmanned missions; humans haven’t been to the moon in more than 30 years. But we will probably return in the next decade, and when we do, we hope to dig even deeper to uncover the moon’s secrets.

During the Apollo missions, NASA astronauts shoveled, bagged and sent back to Earth close to 400 kilograms of lunar rocks and soil. But researchers studying these samples never found water. Now, after decades of coming up dry, scientists have found evidence that the moon’s interior once held — and perhaps still holds — water.