 We are so excited to be sitting in Pete McGinnis-Mark's chair with Jeff Taylor and Linda Martell. Jeff is a researcher at HIGP and Linda Martell is an academic support person at HIGP. And if you didn't know what HIGP, I can't help you. It's Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology and it is in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. And these guys are regular visitors here on research in Manoa. Today we're calling the show A New Age for Lunar Exploration. This is very exciting, isn't it, Jeff? It is exciting and especially because it comes with a presidential memorandum. It's so important. It wasn't just the tweet. And what the president is to change the, we have a national space policy that is always evolving. And he changed some wording in it to say we are going to go return humans to the moon. And it's going to be a partnership with other countries and the private sector. That's interesting. With the isolationist mood, otherwise preventing Washington, it sounds like a breath of fresh air, don't you think? Yeah, it is. And we have experience in space in international partnerships because the International Space Station truly is international. Quite a few countries. It's an interesting thing for a test of the resolve of the space station, by the way, is going to be one of the big partners is Russia. And we have this war of words with... Did you say North Korean? No, they are not... North Koreans are not part of it yet. But even with these war of words with Russia, space stations functioning. And so far, we've left all that kind of sniping at each other down on the earth. And who knows, that's why if we have an International Space Station with a big private sector involvement with companies from around the world, maybe they do work together. Whereas no matter what's going on down here. Well, it's nice to have international things because it brings people together and it makes the world, I think, a better place. But can you give us a pricey on where we are in terms of lunar exploration? I remember in 1968 we landed some guys on the moon. 69. Thank you. So where has it gone since then? Where are we now in terms of the level of sophistication of our science on the moon? That's just one for you, Linda. Yeah, tell them about the great article we are about to have go online. DSRD, our website, will be posting an article today or tomorrow about this new age for the moon. So we've learned a lot about the moon from the rocks that those astronauts brought back. The chemistry, the history of that body. But the new programs are saying let's, we came up with so many more questions about the moon than we answered. Let's continue the exploration in the public-private partnerships. So we're still trying to figure out the chemistry. And we're also, especially about the materials that maybe are economically important to us on Earth. Okay, so you say return to the moon. We've been away? People have been away since 1972. Wow. And, but people are going back for one thing. The Chinese plan a sample return mission. And the rumor is that their spacecraft is quite robust and big, kind of big enough to send people in. So it could be that they will, within only a few years, send astronauts to the lunar surface. But besides the astronauts, we've had landers on the moon, the Chinese again, did a rover mission. We've had orbiting missions that are fabulous from Japan, India, China, and the... On their own. With us or on their own? The Chinese did it on their own. The Indians did the mission on their own, but they had two U.S. instruments on it. That was NASA-funded instruments. It's common now to have a big mission by maybe one consortium, and then the instruments can come from different countries. So NASA's plans are to continue that sort of idea. One of the interesting things about, you know, how science works, you make discoveries. Sometimes they're only temporary because they just give you a new pathway to follow. And then you find out that, oh, that was wrong, but you need more information. And we have a long list of information. One of the things NASA's done over the years is to have community input into the planning. And one such organization is called LEAG, which stands for Lunar Exploration Analysis Group. You have to know your letters and know how to say acronyms. Acronyms are all important in this area. And LEAG in its current form started during the George W. Bush administration when they had the Space Exploration Initiative. And it started as an entity then to say, what should we do when we go to the moon in terms of science and resource utilization and learning to live and work on the moon? And all these community inputs have been going on forever. And as an example of that, this was on this committee. There is an advancing science of the moon. And this updates a National Academy of Sciences or National Research Council study done in 2006 that had concepts to study, areas of research for the moon. And this committee simply took a look at these things and said, we learned something there, but now we need to know this. And went through all eight concepts and then added three others based on new results such as the amount of water in and on the moon, which was not known even in 2006. And so it's very interesting. But if you allow me to brag just a wee bit. Please. In this, at the end is the membership of this. They're called specific action teams from LEAG. I thought that up. Anyway, if you take a look here, there are red marks next to these members. Those eight with red marks have a direct Hawaii association. About half. About half the members of this committee. One, the two co-chairs were former graduate students of ours. Sam Lawrence and Brett Denevi. And then Barbara Cohen was a postdoc here. Georgia had a Kramer at the Lunar Planetary Institute. She was one of our undergraduate geology physics majors and a spacecraft undergraduate fellow. I know Paul Lucy. He was my genius colleague at HIGP. Mark Robinson was a Pete McGinnis Mark graduate student. He is the principal investigator on the camera called LROC. Lunar Observer Camera. And then, oh my gosh, Jeffrey Taylor. That's me. I'm there, too. I'm there, too. And then, who's at the bottom? Benjamin Bussey. Oh, Ben Bussey. Yeah. Ben Bussey. He's a big honcho. He's the Chief Scientist for Human Exploration Director at NASA Headquarters. And so it's really, it's good. It just shows we actually are a going concern here. This is the community. This is the community. This is the community input. This is the representatives of a broad area of expertise. It's the American community, though. The American community, yeah. But the actual community, the lunar community, much bigger than that. And in fact, this last week, I did not go. Paul Lucy did, and a couple of his graduate students went to a meeting in Japan called New Views of the Moon 2. It was already at New Views of the Moon 1. But he's updating because he's now 12 years old. And so this is a big meeting that was really completely international, held in Japan to emphasize that point. But European participation, U.S., Japanese, and I don't know if, since I didn't go, I don't know how many Chinese participants, but probably from every space-faring nation and people who have big research programs in space. Also, I was going to add that it's updating some information from before, which is kind of like what this, exactly what this team did. They looked at a, what was it, 2000 and like 10-year-old list of, what are the goals for lunar exploration? Let's update them based on all this new information we have. And so the new leader of this group is Sam Lawrence, who was a grad student at HIG. Oh, one of your graduate students. He's the chair now of this league. And the first chair ever and founder of it, of course, is Jeff Taylor. Right here at our table. And now I'm proving I'm a grandfather or something that Sam was my graduate student. It's really remarkable. We have a slide that shows some of the different books and things from the community input because it's really important to know that it's just not one or two people coming up with. What should we do on the moon? Let's take a look at the slides. Here we go. Community input. So what is this now? Well, this is just a sampling. Up on the right there's the league logo. But the middle one that's kind of big is the Scientific Contacts for Exploration of the Moon. That was a National Research Council study. And those studies are done with a big committee. They usually have 15 people on them, but they bring in, they call it testimony, they bring in experts over the course of a year or so and write a report about what are the unsolved scientific problems. They do this across many areas. You know, you sometimes see it come out in the whole pharma-exthetical business, you know, what is proven to be effective, why not, those kind of things. But it's an energy issue, too. The other one, Vision and Voyages. For Planetary Sciences. Well, in the decade that's another National Research Council 10-year plan for things. Again, there's a lot of mixing and matching of these committees. And on the left, the Lunar Science for Land Admissions. This is one of the examples of a recent thing that happened not long after, well, it happened early this year. I think it was in January, NASA Ames Research Center. It was talking about, well, if we go back with people or with rovers, where should we go? There are big problems we want to solve, both in terms of resources, in terms of science. And that brought together a whole bunch of people. And that's available, too, online. All the talks are available online. And there's a summary that's been written. And you know what they did? They had the organizers, had graduate students who were attending put together the summary so that it was a great exercise for them to learn the whole process of doing, you know, the whole community input and summarizing things for a broader audience. That was really interesting. Something to say about real estate law. It's not about real estate, it's about relationships. So the moon. Same thing. Likewise. The new ideas, too, are bringing together the human exploration division of NASA and then the more robotic division of planetary science. And they're coming together better to get back to the moon. Well, have we got any other slides you want to see now? I would like to ask you where it goes from here. Well, we have some really great opportunities here in Hawaii to get on this train back to the moon. Okay, so let's address that. So, okay, we have the president's support. It's not a defined... It's the president and also the vice president and they reinstituted the National Space Council, which is chaired... They was eliminated somewhere along the lines in one of these past presidents, but it used to be an effective organization. And it has a chair who's the vice president of the U.S. And then the members of the thing are the cabinet secretaries. And I'm sure some of the meetings they send representatives, but it is an interesting thing. There's an executive secretary who's a guy named Scott Pace with an old space hand and mission planning and whole program development. So it really is... The current administration seems to be really keen on doing this in a way that... And it tends to sell it this way. It's kind of patriotic or nationalistic in the way they express some things. But they have said explicitly about international cooperation. So it's not like they're completely ignored. So interesting. In a time where we do so many isolationist things, in a time where we deny the science of climate change, we are embracing this science. Very interesting. So let me just take a minute and just get the track of what's going to happen. So NASA is the lead American agency. NASA is going to collaborate with universities, with the community in this pamphlet, this book, all around the country. NASA is going to convene meetings. NASA is going to reach out to other countries, I suppose, and other communities of scientists in other countries. And NASA is going to plan out an agenda for what we are going to study, learn, develop, and what we are going to do in terms of going to the moon, both manned trips and unmanned trips, and on through the years. I mean, this is a major project that will last for a long time now. Yes. And for those of us who think space exploration, human exploration is really critical, I think it has to be, as Jordan W. Bush said in a statement starting a space exploration initiative, that it's a journey, not a race. And that's the key thing. It's a journey to put people on the moon or installations on the moon permanently to have them show that you can live, work in space, develop commercial products in space, do things that might benefit space exploration and make it easier and cheaper, but also at the same time. We don't know what the products will be for the Earth, but there could be great spin-offs to the Earth that we simply don't know yet. What was that quote from one of the space policy advisors? About the expanding... Yeah. It's expanding the Earth's economic sphere into the whole solar system. Oh, what a great notion. Isn't it? Yeah, that's... It's making it... Well, we have started... We have direct TV, right? And we have satellite, all kinds of satellites that are commercial. We have this GPS thing. You hear about this GPS thing? That's a commercial... Partly commercial. Some of this is government partnerships, too, with private sector, but that's just the beginning of it. There's a whole space. You can imagine the sphere being... a sphere the size of the distance from the Earth to the moon, because that's kind of near... It's easy to get to, because it isn't... It's three days away, rather than... Can I live there? Six months. Not yet, but if we would descend, for example... This way has to be a journey. If you're going to have... You kind of have to put houses up, right? And habitats, labs... And if you make that out of lunar material, you could do it all with various combinations of new technology, including 3D printing, to make the habitats before people arrive and do it robotically. And then it's maybe finishing touches are done where robots don't have quite the facility to do it when people finally get there again. It doesn't mean people can't go to different places on the moon as bases we need to establish, but it's a very exciting thing. This is the time to let your imagination fly. Take everything we've ever learned and everything we wanted to know and then apply your imagination and you know what happens? You have a break. Let's go. I'm Andrea Gabriele. I'm the host for Young Talent's Making Way here in Fintech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Fintech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Okay, we're back with Jeff Taylor and Linda Martell talking about the moon more specifically here on Research Manoa. We're talking about a new age for lunar exploration. It's a big deal. Okay, and they're both involved in it. How exciting, yeah. And it's not only that, but so professors, staff, people, graduate students, undergraduate students, people in the UH system, that's what's up. This is good news for HIGP, isn't it? This is your cup of tea, actually. Yes, and in some broad way, the whole School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology, especially that tea matters, and our HIGP outfit has the technology in it. I'm hoping one of the big things we do is develop communication. Is there funding? Does this mean an infusion of new funding or what? Yes, and there is a program. What is the name of it? It's an acronym, very important. It's DALI, D-A-L-I, which is Development of Advanced Lunar Instrumentation. That's a good acronym, that one. It's a good acronym, and that's a new program that's going to fund instrument development for small to large lunar missions emphasizing instruments that could be used on other missions through other places as well, and also for research utilization. These are very important concepts that they have now put down in their research announcements. And one of the things we are, in fact, this week we'll be working on is a proposal with our colleague Dave Blake and Philippe Sarrazin. They are the inventors of an instrument that is on the Curiosity rover on Mars that does what we call x-ray diffraction. What this does is it allows you to identify every mineral in a pile of dirt or crushed rock that's there. Using light or something else? Using x-rays. Yeah, and what Linda and I have done over the past several years is to analyze, determine the mineral concentrations in 117 lunar soils, and hadn't been done before. We had looked at all kinds of different ways, but not just total mineralogy, and this relates to things like my colleague Paul Lucy does in remote sensing. If we know the minerals and we know the reflected light spectrum looks like, you can improve the algorithms to get the right answer. And so these 117 soils end up opening up the whole moon by free of remote sensing to really quantitative mineralogy. Why do you want to know these things? It's to understand what kind of rocks are there, how they got there, the whole diversity of rocks on the moon, the chains of magma compositions through time, and this is what part of the interior. You learn so much from what's there now about what happened before. Yeah, it's amazing what record there is in any rock. You know, the Hawaiian rocks tell us a lot about the mantle of the earth beneath us, 100 kilometers down. So the same idea on the moon? Yeah, same idea. So whatever you find in there. And your time travelers, because it has the record of the moon's initial and primary crust, and then what happened after that, the whole record is there. It's not always easy to read. Well, that's the challenge, you know. But you know how to do that now, because you've done it in other contexts. Plus, once you know what's there, then you can find out if there's an economic resource or something to tap into. But can we show a picture of the instrument that we used to do this? Oh yes, oh yes. Number five. The orange box. The orange box. That's a cyborg on the left operating it. Looks a lot like you, Jeff. Well, I made them. We made them that way. We wanted them to be very attractive. We were talking about technology development. So this was a huge development to make an X-ray diffraction instrument so small that you could put it into an orange case. It's portable. You designed that. No, we did it. Dave Blake and Philippe Sarasen who are in Bayer at NASA Ames related. Philippe had a small company. What they did for the Curiosity rover on Mars which determines mineralogy on the surface of Mars a long ways away, they used that technology to develop a terrestrial instrument to use, like we're using it here, it's out in the field doing geologic surveys. They have modified versions of it that can be used to study paint pigments in old art to know that they are Looking for minerals, right? It's the same thing. It does some chemical analysis too. So it's really a fascinating thing. So on this Dolly program we're going to apply with Dave and Philippe and others to build a new version of this that we modified somewhat for the moon and our role would be to make mineral mixtures that would simulate it so we can test it and then maybe use the real lunar samples as a final kind of test and we already have our own analyses of it so we know what the answer is and we'll see if the new instrument gets it. Is it better? Does it need tweaking? But this instrument development is something we really do. With another person in NASA Ames having to do with reflected light spectroscopy and it really is it's fascinating. So you think up what you'd like to learn you look at what you've done in the past the techniques and the instruments you've built in the past you see if you can apply them to the current inquiry into what's going on what will be going on the moon and you redesign or if you can't answer it yet you think of the new instrument you need and like the students coming in now have backgrounds in physics and math and geology and engineering and they're coming up with the new instruments so who decides what goes actually on the spaceship? When do you have instruments developed and they have to be sufficiently advanced NASA has a thing called technology readiness level TRL Okay, alright. We like acronyms. It says that it's advanced enough that you could actually make a flight instrument and know the components that have to go into it you know the special electronics there's special metals and all these kinds of things so this program Dali is meant to actually bring it to a level where you could then make a flight instrument those are competed on missions sometimes whole missions are competed or instrument slots are competed and they have a big review process it's very elaborate and as open as it can be to and as fair as something can be when you've got humans involved I mean it's really as well managed review system within NASA. So in the process you're publishing about this I mean do you in fact go out and publish that at what point do you publish the benefit of your work? We are about to work on a paper about our X-ray results from these 117 soils and that will be we already put it on a database online that's also at NASA Ames then that's so that anyone can use it once we're satisfied that it's going to be user friendly but then we'll write a paper about it draw attention to the database and explain how good is it and because we have mineral mixtures that we tested again another group did a different way of doing mineralogy but of only six soils or something like that that's true anyway smaller number and we just did more You're criss-crossing in the entire global because you're publishing you're publishing to everybody so it raises all the boats and NASA data is publicly available that's really important yeah this is it's for the common good really for humankind I think another great project is another program where they added a component for they call it in situ resource utilization and this is the NASA has this category of announcements called broad agency announcements I don't know where the term comes from but they had an explicit section saying resource utilization specifically on a moon and so we have connected with our colleagues in Pisces the Pacific international exploration systems there's a glossary at the end of this and anyway and to use new technologies to extract ice from the water bound in ice in lunar polar regions we now know that there are dark areas in the poles that are in permanent shadow we have a picture of that too this is pretty exciting stuff so do you ever get patents on what you do do you ever sell it do you ever well we don't make enough instruments Paul Lucy has patents and Blake and Sarrison had a patent on this and that's terrestrial spin-off in the orange box they were by the way or it was Fleepe's company bought out by Olympus which is a big instrumentation company and so I think Fleepe has a really nice car now so what about you guys is this mean does this discussion mean my last question that you are going to be dedicated to the lunar project going forward is this going to be a big piece on your plate right now starting right now it has so we're excited because there are these new calls for proposals that we can all be a part of the new one what we're not going to do is to forget about our website planetary science research discoveries being good at that logo was popped on that screen can we just see that as a closing point this is the website there it is and it's we discuss new discoveries and how much they haven't discovered in about anything in the solar system that focuses on especially kind of geochemical kinds of things and this week read our story about the new age of the moon on the website right there starting by tomorrow morning will you guys come back and talk to us about it again certainly we'll get progress reports on progress reports coming from Jeff Taylor and Linda Martell thank you so much thank you Jack