 And welcome to tomorrow now before we get started with our interview I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow We'll talk and make this specific segment of this episode happen These are our patreon premier members These are people who've contributed ten dollars or more to this specific episode and a huge shout out to all of the new Premier members we've had more premier members getting added this week since I think believe the history of the show So welcome to all of our new premier members We also has our patreon producers These are people who've contributed five dollars or more to this specific episode and each one of these different levels Gets a different reward. So check our different sections over at patreon.com Slash TMRO to see what kind of reward level you can get It starts at one penny and goes all the way up to ten dollars or more. All right, let's go ahead and get started We're joined by dr. Barbara Cohen from the Marshall Space Flight Center. She's the Lead at the Planetary Science Group there also works on as a principal investigator for a bunch of other projects including the lunar Flashlights so welcome Barbara to the show Thanks, Ben. I'm happy to be here. All right, let's talk about a lunar flashlight a little bit first off It's a really cool name. What is it? Lunar flashlight is a very small satellite It's about 10 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 30 centimeters So it's about the size of two loaves of bread. We call it a 6u cube sat In cubes at worlds a cube is 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters And if you stack six of them together, it's six u's or six units So it's a very small satellite and it's going to go to the moon and we're going to look for Exposed water ice now exposed water ice probably only exists in very very very cold places Like the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles So we're going to skim over the lunar south pole and we're going to look for water ice in those permanently shadowed regions Now of course if you just had a camera or a spectrometer that was a passive instrument You would use sunlight bouncing off of those areas and collect those photons to look at them Permanently shadowed regions of course don't have sunlight bouncing into them. So we have to take an active illuminator That's our flashlight. So we're taking four lasers with us. We're going to shine them down into those shadowed regions We're going to collect those photons and we're going to look at the spectrum that comes back and water ice is going to absorb Some of those photons so if we get fewer photons back than we sent and we know that water ice absorbed them If we get all the photons back that we sent we know there's no water ice there. Hey, what does that get? Let's say we find some water ice. I mean we found water on the moon. We've looked for different things a couple times Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So it feels like we've found this before. So what is this specific thing get us? Sure, so water on the moon like water on Mars We discovered a bunch of times but actually scientifically each one is different And it means a different thing for people who may want to go there and use those resources So the water on the moon that we know about now there's water locked in the minerals very very small amounts That's not something that you're going to be able to crack open a mineral and drink So it's it's scientifically interesting, but not a great resource same for the water that's on the surface That's from the solar wind interaction So as hydrogen comes streaming in from the Sun and it interacts with the silicate mineral silicates are 50% oxygen Those hydrogens and those oxygens bond and make H2O molecules But again one molecule on the surface isn't enough to drink We do know that at the poles there are deep deposits of water ice We know that from radar measurements, but underneath a meter or more of lunar regolith Lunar regolith is very hard to dig through imagine having to dig in your yard a meter or more That's a lot of work to do just to get to something So what we're looking for specifically is Accessible water frost that maybe humans could go use in the future and we could use this for a number of things For potentially drinking but more likely for like rocket fuel and things like that for habitation on the moon Sure, absolutely anything that you need hydrogen and oxygen or water for All right possibly other elements too There may be other things in there mixed with it that you could use something like methane or ammonia or CO2 anything like that as well Also things you probably wouldn't want to drink What's really interesting about this particular mission is how it's going up You're not going up on an atlas or a delta. You're actually going up on one of the first space launch systems Tell us a little bit about that Sure, so the exploration mission one for the space launch system It's going to be the first time that we check out that whole rocket stack You might remember a couple years ago We sent the Orion on a delta as a checkouts light But this is the first time we're going to stack that Orion on top of the big monster rocket And we're going to send that whole stack out where Ryan's going to do Loop around the moon and come back But while it's doing that we're going to deploy 13 different CubeSats actually so they're in the adapter ring between the Orion and the rocket There's space in there for a whole bunch of little satellites. They're all going to be 6u satellites They're all going to be the same size But the great thing about going on this rocket is that we get beyond low Earth orbit We don't get deployed in Earth orbit and that means you can use low impulse in space propulsion methods to go to Different places in the solar system So we're using green propulsion to go to the moon other people are going to be using things like ammonia There's a mission called me a scout that's going to be using a big solar sail to go to an asteroid So these kinds of things don't have enough propulsion or a lift to get us off the earth They have enough to move us around the solar system once we get out of Earth's gravity well Actually that worked out brilliantly because both Shire and warp 11 asked what kind of propulsion you're using To move around so the next question coming up is space Mike which says will you be going into a polar lunar orbit to investigate the poles? Yep, good question. We are going into polar lunar orbit That means that we have to spend some time getting into the correct plane So we do a couple earth flybys to change our plane get into sort of a polar orientation get captured into a low energy Transfer and spiral down around the pole and you guys were talking before about how close do you know is getting to Jupiter Lunar flashlight is going to get within 20 kilometers of the South Pole That's pretty sporty. Is that the end of the mission when you're getting that close or you are you using you slinging by at that point? Yeah, we have a very elliptical orbit And so the paralun is going to be about 20 kilometers and the Apollo is going to be about 9,000 kilometers It's going to take us about 12 hours to do a single orbit but we're only taking data right over the South Pole and of course to get the best signal with a very small laser in a Very small satellite. We need to get very close to the surface What kind of power you're going to be using on the vehicle and how long do you think it's going to last? Well, we have solar panels that power the vehicle and those will last a good long time There's no problems with that. Our lasers are powered with standard lithium ion batteries actually And so they'll probably last a good long time, too We think that because we are coming so close to the pole We get perturbed by the gravitational field of the moon quite a bit And we'll have to do trajectory corrections pretty much every trajectory and that's going to Deplete our propulsion. We use most of our propulsive force to get into the transfer orbit to get into the capture orbit And then we'll only have a little bit left to do these kind of corrections And when that runs out that'll be the end of the mission And what do you have any like awesome plans for the end of the mission like crashing into the moon and doing something neat? Well, we are going to crash into the moon There are restrictions on all missions, of course as to how you can dispose of the mission and for lunar missions We have to have a disposal plan that takes away from the Apollo historic sites So we can't just let it crash wherever we want it to we're gonna have to do a controlled Litho breaking maneuver and so we'll probably do that somewhere around a pole Unfortunately, it's going to be too small I think to be seen by any of our orbiting assets and LRO our lunar reconnaissance orbiter We hope will be there, but there's no guarantee that that'll be there at the time to observe it anyway It won't be observable from Earth. It's pretty small Would would L if LRO was if the lunar reconnaissance orbiter wasn't the right position would it be able to see it? Or is it I mean you're pretty tiny It's pretty tiny. I think we would have to Do some before and after imaging. I'm not sure that it could see it Actually a question from one of my co-hosts asking how much off-the-shelf components? How many off-the-shelf components is lunar flashlight using? That's a really great question and it's one of the reasons I tried to make the distinction in the beginning The lunar flashlight and these other satellites are not really cube sets as we understand them cube sets have grown to be an amazing part of spacecraft building that even university students can do by buying kits and assembling them and launching them those kits typically have Components that are designed for Earth orbit, right? So we're inside a nice magnetosphere and we don't have a lot of radiation And once you're in Earth orbit, you don't need a lot of propulsion So typically they don't have all the things that we need to have also we need a radio That can send and receive an x-band because that's how far away the moon is We can't use the uhf for example So we have a lot of components that are not off the shelf. They are spacecraft components interplanetary spacecraft components We hope that things like the radio will become catalog items these very small components for small electronics Rad hard electronics So we hope that some of these will become catalog items, but right now they're pretty much custom So the u part or the cube set part of it is really the external envelope and everything inside of it is custom So taking kind of that concept and the idea of the space launch system being able to bring you a lot further than normal Using off the shelf components and the space launch system combined Are you going to be able to go out further using lower cost satellite for other missions? Because I know you do a lot more than just lunar flashlight Are you looking at these combination of things for things in the future? Yes, exactly. All of these cube sets are very much pathfinders for doing planetary science with these very very small buses I think that um in our development what we've seen some of the Um difficulties that we've had to overcome and some of the challenges that we've had I think really point to the best use of these satellites as maybe daughter ships to larger missions And sending them into environments where you wouldn't want to send your main satellite So exactly what you're talking before about jupiter's radiation belts You know, maybe you could send some of these into the great red spot as probes For things like enceladus where you've got plumes Maybe you could send one of these through the plume if you were trying to perturb an asteroid Maybe you could crash one of these into an asteroid and watch from a larger spacecraft bus So I think these as daughter satellites are going to be very helpful and very capable Be able to communicate back to their Mother spacecraft rather than communicating all the way back to the earth Having to bring all their own propulsion things like that. Now. Are you tied to the space launch system? Because you know rockets with nasa unfortunately are tied to politics. We're about to get a new president There's not a zero chance that space launch system will be canceled. So can you go on an atlas or a delta instead? We have a design Guideline to be compatible with other rockets, but honestly the space launch system and the kubesats are tied together Because we want to be able to show the capability of the space launch system Not just for a ryan, but for other payloads and secondary payloads as well So we're very excited to be a part of the space launch system talking about communication a little bit further K. McCoy asked Does the lunar flashlight uses a deep space network to talk to earth? Or do we have some kind of system to talk in a lunar spacecraft that isn't quite as big as this deep space network? Maybe t-dress, which is the tracking data relay satellite system Something like that. Or are you just using just regular old antenna like a really big array on earth? Right. Yeah, so we looked at losing t-dress a lot of lunar missions have looked at using t-dress as well There are some very special Configurations or geometry that you might be able to use t-dress. We're not in one of them So we are using the deep space network. We are launching in 2018. We hope We don't know that the lunar reconnaissance orbiter will be there for us as a relay satellite So we are having to we're required to take our own communication to correspond with the To talk to the deep space network Is that a problem you're working on solving? Because if you're going to be sending a bunch of cube sets up You want these smaller satellites bringing huge communication arrays isn't going to be something you can do or you guys working on a Intergalactic communication network, so to speak Um, I don't think so. I know there are plans for the deep space network to keep going and to upgrade its 35 meter dishes will only need the 35 meter dishes for lunar A lot of universities actually are very interested in having their own Antennas to be able to talk to their cube sets and they already do that universities talk to their own cube sets in low-earth orbit There are some that would like to upgrade to have that capability to talk to deep space cube sets as well Space mic asks if you have any other lunar missions coming up that are kind of cool Yeah, so on that same mission the em1 there are a couple other lunar cube sets Sky fire out of Lockheed martin is going to make a flyby of the moon and makes the measurements and then go out into deep space There are two other orbiters one is luna map. There's luna with an h like your muscle luna map And it has a big h because it's looking for hydrogen deposits So when we talked earlier, we're looking for the water on the surface There's also water buried deep underneath and that this luna map is going to be looking for those very high resolutions So it's going to make a skimming orbit just like ours. It's going to come down very close to the south pole You're working on some very very very cool things Where can people go to get more information not just on lunar flashlight, but all the projects you're working on Well, you can go to the nasa marshal plenitary website. It's called plenitary.mfsc.nasa.gov I'll say I was looking at your bio before I let you guys look at your bio and my favorite line in there is that you're A lunatic at the very bottom. I thought that was absolutely hilarious. I thought that was brilliant, but I love this This is great. Uh, that's my license plate too. Oh really? That's fantastic. Well now i'll know forever up Up at marshal space flight center. We'll see All right, that's awesome. All right. Thank you so much for taking time out of your saturday to join us It was a great amount of fun. I hope you won't be a stranger to the show and we're looking forward to the launch of SLS on exploration mission one to watch lunar satellite and a bunch of other cube stats and uh, ryan's gonna be awesome Yep, it'll be great