FREDERICTON — In the labs at Canada's only NASA centre, researchers are working flat out to conjure up a recipe for a hot commodity in the space world: moon dust.
The quest went into high gear more than a year ago, when U.S. President George W. Bush pledged to establish a lunar base no later than 2020 as a springboard to a human mission to Mars and beyond.
Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent over the coming years in the race back to the moon, with a significant chunk devoted to figuring out how to tap lunar resources.
Tonnes of fake moon rubble, known as lunar regolith simulant, will be needed to satisfy the research demand for both NASA and the corporations that hope to supply the space agency with equipment for moon colonization.
"The surface of the moon is very different from the Earth, and scientists are now trying to grapple with what that means in terms of putting equipment and humans on the moon," says John Spray, director of the Planetary and Space Science Centre at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
"Both NASA and the European Space Agency are now planning to go to Mars via the moon, setting up bases on the moon in the next decade or so."
And so Spray and graduate student Melissa Battler, a native of Roseville, Ont., near Kitchener, are working to come up with a recipe for fake lunar soil within the next 18 months.
They aren't alone, and they aren't the first. There have been 34 different formulations cooked up since the real thing was brought back during the Apollo missions, though none has been an exact match.
Supplies of the remaining moon replicate, known as JSC-1, are down to less than will fill a 20-litre bucket, according to a report Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal.
So urgent is the need to replenish that NASA called together about 100 researchers from North America and Japan two months ago to figure out how to deal with the shortage and how to come up with new formulas for lunar rubble.
Launching missions from the moon has practical advantages. Taking off beyond the pull of the Earth's gravity would burn up less fuel, and the lunar soil could perhaps be mined for fuel or other necessities.
Samples brought back from Apollo missions suggest that regolith is rich in various minerals, as well as helium and hydrogen.
"We certainly aren't going to be able to go to Mars, asteroids or other planetary bodies unless we can learn to use what is on those bodies to leapfrog to the next dimension of the solar system," says Ron Schlagheck, a program manager for space resources at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and one of the key organizers for the regolith research meeting.
Figuring out what resources can be extracted from the moon is key to future exploration. For instance, could the lunar surface be tapped to provide an oxygen supply for a colony? Could it be used to erect buildings? Will it shield human inhabitants from deadly cosmic rays?
The New Brunswick centre, a Canadian affiliate of NASA, is developing a formula for regolith for Electric Vehicle Controllers Ltd. and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT), Sudbury-based developers of mining technology about to ink an agreement with the American space agency to come up with prototypes for mining equipment that will work on the lunar surface.
If all goes well, they will have perfected working models of robotic drill and barrel-wheel mining gear ready for the space agency by 2008.
But the equipment will have to be thoroughly tested here on Earth with replicate regolith to ensure it can plow properly through hard, tightly compacted dirt, especially in the frozen conditions of the lunar south pole.
The same machines will also have to deal with the talcum-powder-like dust of the loose soil on the surface, which can clog air pipes and jam equipment.
"We can't just send a repair guy to the moon to fix it, as much as I'd like to go," jokes Dale Boucher, NORCAT's manager of prototype development.
Elements of lunar rubble can be found on Earth. Past simulations, such as JSC-1, were created around volcanic rock and ash.
But, says Spray, no one has attempted to recreate it with anorthosite, a type of rock common on the moon but far less so on this planet.
Spray and Battler intend to scout out sources of it here and work with those. There are, for instance, deposits in Labrador, where it is quarried for decorative stone for kitchen flooring and countertops.
But it's hardly as simple as grinding up anorthosite. Indeed, the challenges are many. The rubble on the moon varies widely in composition and density depending on where you are on the lunar surface and how deep you dig.
And it is constantly affected by bombardments from space.
Unlike Earth, which is protected by its atmosphere, the moon is exposed to solar radiation and other cosmic rays.
As well, meteorites as tiny as a millimetre relentlessly ping the moon, creating tiny beads of glass on the surface and even fusing minerals such as iron into the lunar dirt.
Comets smacking into the moon may leave ice deposits, changing the regolith yet again.
So the researchers will have to tinker with the rock, blending in bits of glass, for instance, and perhaps irradiating it.
They will reproduce their lunar soil in some bulk to challenge its consistency, test it for properties such as magnetism and permeability, and compare it under a microscope with the real stuff scooped up during Apollo missions.
Battler herself aspires to become an astronaut and hopes to get to the moon, and beyond, someday. But for now her research is grounded in the absolute necessity to use the moon as a launching pad for future exploration.
"The whole point of doing this is because we are going to go back to the moon," she says. "We're learning how to use the resources in space to get further and to establish a presence in space."
David Stonehouse is a freelance reporter based in the Maritimes.
