If NASA planning stays on the rails politically, technically and financially, america will plant recent footprints on the moon toward the tip of 2025.
That touchdown, on a mission called Artemis 3, will probably be the primary human lunar landing since Apollo 17 moonwalkers stirred up the grey dust in December 1972.
Artemis 3 is meant to be the primary of quite a few human missions to the Artemis Polar Exploration Zone — the region poleward of 84 degrees south latitude.
Choosing a secure and science-worthy landing region for Artemis 3 is a difficult task. But there isn’t any doubt that great discoveries lie ahead — and one potential surprise might be detecting life on the moon.
Related: NASA’s Artemis 3 mission: Landing humans on the moon
Super-cold craters
Latest research suggests that future visitors to the lunar south pole region needs to be looking out for evidence of life in super-cold permanently shadowed craters — organisms that might have made the trek from Earth.
Microbial life could potentially survive in the cruel conditions near the lunar south pole, suggested Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“One of the vital striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges wherein certain microbial life can survive, there could also be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies,” Saxena told Space.com.
Indeed, the lunar south pole may possess the properties that may enable survival and potentially even episodic growth of certain microbial life, Saxena said.
“We’re currently working on understanding which specific organisms could also be most suited to surviving in such regions and what areas of the lunar polar regions, including places of interest relevant to exploration, could also be most amenable to supporting life,” he said.
In work presented at a recent science workshop on the potential Artemis 3 landing sites, Saxena and study members reported that the lunar south pole may contain substantial surface niches that might be potentially habitable for quite a few microorganisms.
Earth’s history — on ice
Is it possible that samples of Earth’s history might be lurking in sun-shy lunar craters?
Small pieces of our planet may need been hurled to the moon as “Earth meteorites” — rocks blasted into space by powerful cosmic impacts.
That’s indeed a possibility, said Heather Graham, an organic geochemist at NASA Goddard who’s also a member of the study team. But that does not imply that Earth microbes also survived that deep-space trip.
“While extraterrestrial transfer of organic molecules from meteoritic sources could be very likely, and indeed observed in our own terrestrial meteorite evaluation, the transfer of microbes from similar sources doesn’t have the identical weight of evidence,” Graham said. “It might be an interesting idea, but without viable data this route can’t be included on this study.”
Graham said that, more importantly, the study team could be very aware of the various ways in which humans are the largest vector of microbes to the moon.
“We’ll soon have 50 years of history of humans and their objects on the surface with no stringent requirements regarding forward contamination,” she said.
“We view humans because the more than likely vector given the extensive data that we have now about our history of exploration and the impact record as a second, albeit less influential, early terrestrial source,” Graham added.
Protected micro-niches
Graham identified that the way in which the study team is approaching this problem is not necessarily because they think Artemis missions will cause a flood of microbes to bloom immediately near the lunar south pole in a “dorm room fridge” scenario.
“Relatively…we are going to almost actually deposit hearty spores in protected micro-niches where the max temperature and radiation protection features at that site will allow them to persist,” Graham said. “That is the ‘survival’ end of the size with spores present.”
Over time, Graham said, ongoing exploration of the moon could proceed to deliver water and carbon sources to those locations, which could in the future lead to growth.
Artemis flight path
Also foreseeing a possible impact from increased traffic to the moon is Paul Lucey of the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology on the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
“There isn’t any query the ultimate approaches of the Artemis spacecraft will deposit carbon dioxide and water ice in permanently shadowed regions along the flight path and should compromise some sorts of investigations,” Lucey told Space.com.
Alternatively, Lucey said that our understanding of how lunar ice is deposited is meager immediately, “so these will probably be very interesting experiments to conduct, given the correct instrumentation.”
It is probably going there will probably be no comprehensive survey of the abundance of those compounds before the primary Artemis surface missions, Lucey observed, so unfortunately the natural background is not going to be known for the lunar south pole. (One Artemis mission has launched so far — Artemis 1, which went to lunar orbit last fall.)
The moon’s north pole will probably be higher preserved, Lucey said, but spacecraft exhaust can also affect the north via transport through the lunar “exosphere” — its very thin and tenuous envelope of gases.
Saxena concluded that considerations for tips on how to investigate a lunar site, whether it is near to regions which may be potentially habitable niches, needs to be taken into consideration for future site assessment and traverse planning.
“These technique of planning and corresponding strategy, techniques and instrumentation which may be involved may be helpful for exploration of Mars as well,” he said.
