Thanga and his team have designed a system that would use solar panels and batteries to provide the power needed to reduce the temperature inside a lava tube to the freezing point needed to create their lunar ark. This is the defining difference between Thanga’s design and Hagedorn’s thought experiment. While Thanga’s group would attempt to actively cool the ark, Hagedorn and the Smithsonian team have envisioned a repository that uses the moon’s natural features to hold samples cryogenically.
“The idea behind our proposal is that to the extent we can do it, it would be passive,” Parenti said. He noted that people have long speculated about the idea of building something that stores materials on the Moon, but all ideas have required a crew to maintain it.
To passively maintain a perpetual deep freeze, they have proposed building the repository at the Moon’s south pole, where, within some craters, coincidences of celestial geometry have aligned to create areas of permanent shadow and temperatures can reach -196 degrees Celsius. Such conditions would mean samples could be stored without a crew and could be maintained solely by rovers and robotics.
While in theory all of this makes these permanent polar shadows ideal for such a project, “we don’t know the basics of what that place is,” Thanga replied. Last month, NASA cancelled a mission That would have been the first rover to explore the pole in part because of the technical challenges it posed. “This is one of the ironic things,” Thanga said. “It’s close to Earth, but it’s perhaps one of the most extreme places in the entire solar system.”
However, Fitzpatrick is confident that NASA’s current lunar roadmap will provide ample opportunities to explore and understand those dark polar realms, including a scheduled mission By the end of this year, the plans are to land in A ridge overlooking a polar shadowBut as NASA looks to explore those regions, Thanga noted, we may simply learn more about how difficult it is to exist and operate in that level of cold.
“Just operating in cryogenic conditions is not trivial,” Thanga said. “Mechanical objects do weird things. They can freeze, jam, etc., in space-like conditions. Even in moderately cold conditions in a vacuum, we have a phenomenon called cold welding,” where two pieces of metal fuse together upon contact.
Thanga argues that the most sensible thing to do is to create the ark in a lava tube, since his colleagues in planetary science expect such tubes to be quite similar to those we have on Earth, albeit much cooler, giving researchers and engineers an idea of what to expect and how to plan.
However, like Hagedorn’s concept, the price and timeline are still being worked out. But Thanga hopes that once the design is finalized (which could take years), it can be built and assembled faster and at a lower cost than the International Space Station.