The Economics of Space Exploration

So part of my work involves developing seismic instruments that can survive in the extreme environments that we find in space.

And this includes the Lunar South Pole, which is a very cold place.

The moon has a long day, 28 days, and a long night, 28 days.

So you can imagine it gets very warm and very cold.

but especially very cold at the Lunar South Pole.

So over the past two years, I've been working to develop these instruments specifically to survive in the subsurface of the Lunar South Pole, and this is for deployment by the astronauts that are anticipated in NASA's Artemis mission that will land on the moon and conduct surface operations on its surface.

And what will

the outcomes be? What will you learn? Yeah, so we're hoping to learn a number of things.

We're very interested in the seismic activity, so how many quakes are present in the Lunar South Pole.

The Apollo missions that took place in the 60s and 70s also landed seismic instruments on the lunar near side.

And so we have an understanding of the seismic activity of that region of the moon, but we have no idea what it's like at the lunar south pole.

This is really critical for a lot of science investigations, but also if we plan to conduct future exploration and perhaps build infrastructure like lunar bases on the south pole of the moon, we really want to understand, is this a safe area to lay down and infrastructure? Is it stable? And seismic measurements will help us understand that.

And when you say subsurface, like how far down are we talking?

Less than a meter.

So just a few feet.

But that helps our seismic instruments get good coupling with the lunar surface.

And that will make it a lot easier for us to get high quality seismic events that we can study and try and figure out what exactly those seismic waves have reflected and refracted off to get a better picture of the interior of the moon.