Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 26, Number 2, January 8, 1999 EIRScience & Technology The Moon: Where it came from, how we will colonize it Dr. Alan Binder discusses the continuing puzzle of where the Moon came from, and the discoveries that will make it more easily habitable. He was interviewed by Marsha Freeman on Nov. 2. Dr. Alan Binder was the originator and motive force behind strated that inexpensive spacecraft, using available technol- the Lunar Prospector mission currently in progress. Lunar ogy, can be marshalled by the private sector to take the next Prospector was launched on Jan. 6, 1998, and it is in a lunar steps in lunar exploration. For NASA to lead the effort for a polar orbit at an altitude of about 60 miles. Less than two manned lunar base in the future, Dr. Binder believes that the months after launch, Dr. Binder and the scientific team an- agency would have to return to the mission-orientation it had nounced stunning new discoveries about the Moon, including during the Apollo program. their estimates of the amount ice at the Moon’s poles. After its primary mission is completed at the beginning of 1999, Lunar Prospector’s orbit will be lowered to less than 15 miles, on average, above the surface of the Moon, for a closer look. Interview: Dr. Alan Binder Dr. Binder, the Principal Investigator for the Lunar Pros- pector mission, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1961 from Northern Illinois University, and a doctorate in geology Q: Many people believe that when we completed the manned and lunar and planetary science in 1967 from the University Apollo missions in the early 1970s, we understood most of of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Dr. Binder was what we would need to know about the Moon. What did we a Principal Investigator on the 1976 Viking Mars Lander learn from the Apollo missions? Camera Team. For ten years, he taught and conducted lunar Binder: Most people erroneously think that the Moon is a research in Germany, and was an adviser to the European small place, and that once you’ve been there and brought a Space Agency. Before his recent founding of the Lunar Re- couple of rocks back, you’ve understood it. Part of the prob- search Institute in Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Binder worked for lem is that when the Apollo program was started, NASA gave Lockheed. He has authored 70 scientific papers, mainly in the a “motherhood and apple pie” objective, which we all have, areas of lunar and Martian geology, geochemistry, petrology, which is to understand the origin and evolution of the Moon and geophysics. and the planets. Those clearly are our overall goals. But sci- During a wide-ranging discussion with 21st Century Sci- ence doesn’t work in that magical way, where you get one ence & Technology Associate Editor Marsha Freeman, piece of information and all of a sudden, Eureka! you under- Binder reviewed the theories of how the Moon was formed stand everything. It’s a slow process of accumulating enor- and where it came from—questions still far from being an- mous amounts of data and sorting it out, and slowly but surely swered. He described the results from his lunar spacecraft and getting an understanding of whatever you’re trying to under- contending theories on whether there is water ice at the poles. stand. Dr. Binder believes that Lunar Prospector has opened the Geologists have been studying the Earth for about 300 door for the colonization of the Moon, because it has verified years, and there have been literally hundreds of thousands of that there is water ice available, and because it has demon- geologists, or certainly on that order of magnitude, who have 32 Science & Technology EIR January 8, 1999 © 1999 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. are younger than this half a billion years. You pick up very few rocks that are much older than that, because they’ve been destroyed by plate tectonics, by weathering, erosion, and so on. We’ve got a lot to learn about the Moon. It’s a very complex place, cer- tainly not as complex as the Earth, but nonetheless very complex, and we have just scratched the surface. My background is basically astron- omy. I was going to be an astronomer and study the planets, and when space- craft came along, instead of telescopes (which I still enjoy), I used spacecraft to study the planets, and specifically, the Moon. We had a very poor understand- ing of the Moon before Apollo, as you might expect, from just remote observa- tions. Even though we had the Lunar Orbiters and Surveyors, that was just the barest beginnings. The Apollo samples, and the Apollo experiments that were put down on the surface, such as the seismic network and the heat flow mea- surements, made a giant leap forward. When we ended Apollo, we had This image taken by the Clementine spacecraft shows the Aitkin basin (center) at the south some very basic knowledge about the pole of the Moon. These permanently shadowed regions at the poles are where scientists expected to find water ice. lunar rocks, petrology, the timescale of lunar events, and the internal structure of the Moon. We did not know if it had a core, which is an important question. studied the Earth and who continue to do so, and we are We did not know what the real sequence of events was, prior still learning about the Earth. The Earth is fairly complex, to the Imbrium impact, since debris from that impact has obviously, but it’s not easy to understand how any planet covered a large part of the Moon, and most of the Apollo sites forms and evolves, and where the resources are. The Moon were near the Imbrium event, so we really had only started to has a diameter about one-quarter of that of the Earth’s, but the decipher this history for the first billion years of the Moon’s surface area is equal to North and South America combined. history. That’s a big place. Think how little we would know about [During Apollo] we sampled Mare Tranquilitatis, Sereni- even just the United States, if there were six crews who spent tatis, and Imbrium, and a little of Oceanus Procellarum, in a grand total of three working days exploring six sites in the terms of mare units. We sampled four or five volcanic units United States. You would know virtually nothing about it. in the mare, and yet there are many times that [number], that That’s where we were with the Moon, after the Apollo have been actually identified in terms of remote sensing. So, program. we’ve hardly even scratched the surface of looking at the To be sure, the Moon is smaller than the Earth. Its active mare basalt units, let alone the highland units. We had only evolution quit pretty much within the first billion years of its one true highland sample site—that was on Apollo 16—and existence. Most of the history that we see written in the rocks the highlands make up 80% or more of the Moon’s surface. and on the surface is the first half a billion years. The time We’ve seen nothing from the far side, nothing from the poles. from the Cambrian, the time of visible life on Earth, to the Basically, we’ve just gotten started. current time, is also half a billion years, and that’s what geolo- gists have been spending these last 300 years trying to deci- Q: Wasn’t it the case that because the Apollo missions were pher. So, the magnitude of effort needed to understand the manned, the landing sites had to be near the equator, and on Moon, at the time when it was active, is about the same as the near side that faces the Earth? that needed to understand the Earth. On the Earth, most rocks Binder: Yes. The Apollo landing sites were dictated by the EIR January 8, 1999 Science & Technology 33 fact that there would be people on the surface. This meant that the rocks are stronger and it takes a lot more force to break they had to be on the near side, to enable communications them. These are interplate quakes, which do occur very infre- with Earth; they had to be near the equator, and all those quently, but are very disastrous. things restricted our accessibility to the Moon. We’ve totally The quakes we see on the Moon are similar in characteris- undersampled the Moon. tic to the interplate quake. It is conceivable that you have One of the things that I want to do is use unmanned vehi- enormous quakes on the Moon, not very frequently, but when cles to bring back samples from the Moon. There is a report they occur they are a very large magnitude. There are a lot of called “Lunar Science from a Lunar Base,” in which we called little ones for every big one. One other factor: Rocks on the out about 100 different sampling sites, just to begin to under- Moon are a factor or two stronger than Earth rocks, because stand the Moon. So, you can see the magnitude of what we’re there is no water or air to weaken them. We could have very talking about. We’ve only had samples from the six Apollo big quakes on the Moon.