APL Hopes to Find One Small Sip for Man on the Moon

By George Berkheimer, STAFF WRITER

Two lunar orbiters scheduled for launch within the next six months will carry high tech dowsing rods designed in Howard County on a mission to find water on the moon.
Constructed by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imager dubbed the Mini-RF will search for ice crystals near the lunar poles and demonstrate new radar technology for future use in planetary resource mapping.
The missions will be conducted on two different platforms: the two-year Chandrayaan-I mission, to be launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) sometime this fall; and NASA's one-year Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, currently undergoing testing at Goddard Space Flight Center, with a tentative launch date of Feb. 27, 2009, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
According to Ben Bussey, APL's deputy principal investigator, the Mini-RF instrument on Chandrayaan-I is designed to conduct systematic SAR mapping of the lunar poles in S-band (2 to 4 gigahertz [GHz]), while an improved, smaller and lighter Mini-RF aboard the LRO will operate in both S-band and X-band (7 to 12.5 GHz).
"We're excited about the unique possibility of having two instruments in orbit at the same time," said Bussey. "That will give us the opportunity to conduct bi-static radar experiments," in which signals would be broadcast from Chandrayaan-I and received by the LRO, providing the most definitive remote technique for discriminating between ice and rock.
To accomplish this, the Mini-RF will function as a scatterometer, measuring the radar scattering properties of the moon's surface and creating low-resolution (75 meters per pixel) regional images that show the extent of polar deposits. The data will be transmitted back to APL and the ISRO for analysis.

Map to the Stars
The lunar mapping expeditions are the first step toward establishing a permanent base on the moon that could be used as a launching point for missions beyond Earth's satellite to other worlds.
In a speech given at NASA headquarters in January this year, President Bush called for completion of the International Space Station by 2010, replacement of the space shuttle with a new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2014 and a return to the moon by 2020.
"In the past 30 years, no human being has set foot on another world or ventured farther upward into space than 386 miles - roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Boston, Mass.," Bush noted during his speech. "It is time for America to take the next steps."
Because space flight is so costly, spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the moon could escape its far weaker gravity with less fuel than is needed to launch from Earth, the president added.
The key is in figuring out how to supply some of the critical resources to support this activity on the moon. Water is a heavy commodity and would be needed in abundance, both for consumption and for the production of the propellant that would be used as rocket fuel. If water and other resources could be harvested from the surface of the moon, the cost of a permanent station could decrease significantly.

'Water' the Odds?
"What we will do [with Chandrayaan-I and the LRO] is create a map to locate useful-sized [ice] deposits," Bussey said. If there are any to be found, the obvious next step would be to land unmanned rovers on the moon to measure and analyze their chemical makeup.
"Many of the moon's craters were made by cometary impacts, and we know that comets are mostly made of water," he said. It's possible, therefore, that some ice could still be found in the moon's permanently shadowed regions.
During his February trade mission to Bangalore, India, Howard County Executive Ken Ulman highlighted the relationship between APL and the ISRO and discussed the mission with Chandrayaan-I Project Director Mylswamy Annadurai.
"The Chandrayaan mission makes a great deal of sense," Ulman said in a dispatch during his visit. "In its four years of development, the project has cost less than .2% of [India's] national research and development expenditures," and is benefitting from and advancing international cooperation. While India is the lead, the United States, Germany, Bulgaria and Japan are all playing a role in the launch.
"India is rightfully proud of this upcoming space mission and they should be credited with opening up the payload to the international community for inclusion in the mission," Ulman said. "I came away from this tour with a deep appreciation for the value of space programs, not only for the scientific purpose, but for the economic development and for international relations as well."

Building on Experience
APL became part of the Chandrayaan-I team in 2005 when the ISRO sought payload proposals from international agencies to fill its excess launch capacity.
"It's not the first time we've been involved in collaborative international efforts," said APL's Deputy Project Manager Helene Winters. "We've done this before when NASA collaborated with the European Space Agency on the Ulysses and Cassini-Huygens missions."
Ulysses is a robotic space probe launched in 1990 to study the sun; Cassini-Huygens, launched in 1997, entered into orbit around Saturn in 2004 to study the planet and its moons.
India is planning a Chandrayaan-II mission that will attempt to land a motorized rover on the moon to collect soil and rock samples and perform chemical analysis of the lunar surface. "If the ISRO puts out a call for payload proposals for this mission, we're likely going to be submitting something in hopes of a follow-on mission," Bussey said.
A successful demonstration of the Mini-RF's capabilities could make it a valuable instrument that could be used to map the surfaces of planets and moons within the solar system and help determine their composition.
As for the outcome of the upcoming missions, "I think our two instruments will achieve our goal" of determining whether or not useful deposits of ice exist on the moon, Bussey said. "Once we have the answer, it's going to be up to NASA to decide if it's worth going down to the surface to investigate."