Even the smallest of shadows on the moon\u2019s surface can harbor water ice and other chemical compounds, known as volatiles, that vaporize at low temperatures.<\/p>\n
The EMILIA-3D team hopes to learn more about these volatiles and the physical properties of the lunar soil itself, including insight into its geologic history and how it responds to disturbances like the blast from a landing thruster on a spacecraft from Earth.<\/p>\n
Such information could prove to be useful when it comes to designing the instruments and equipment that people will use someday to explore and even settle on the moon.<\/p>\n
Andy Ryan led the project through the proposal process when he was a staff research scientist at the U of A. He now works as the head of mining and payloads for the deep-space mining company AstroForge, though he continues to serve as co-investigator and science-team lead for EMILIA-3D.<\/p>\n
“Understanding how human exploration affects volatiles, such as water, will be important before Artemis astronauts land at the lunar south pole,” said Ryan, whose daughter\u2019s name just happens to be Emilia. “Homing in on the correct physics will have important implications for where water ice could be stable and if human activity could destabilize it.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
William Hartmann projecting photographic plates of the moon onto a white hemisphere to create the Rectified Lunar Atlas during moon mapping work at the University of Arizona in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n
University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory<\/p>\n
No specific launch date has been set, but EMILIA is not expected to fly until 2029 at the earliest.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The team will spend the next 24 months building the instrument, which is designed to operate from any lander anywhere on the moon.<\/p>\n
Its thermal imager and two eye-like stereovision cameras will be mounted on a gimbal so they can scan the surface from the base of the lander to the horizon every eight hours for two weeks, recording the changing shadows throughout the long lunar day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even the smallest of shadows on the moon\u2019s surface can harbor water ice and other chemical compounds, known…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[270],"tags":[67184,582,70748,70746,70743,18,29615,275276,19,17,275275,99751,70747,10626,275278,1226,48421,8197,133,11662,275277,10214,451,1224,27392,70752,64986,26824,67185,8913,17563,140827],"class_list":["post-651461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-astronautics","tag-astronomy","tag-astropolitics","tag-bodies-of-the-solar-system","tag-discovery-and-exploration-of-the-solar-system","tag-eire","tag-flight","tag-gerard-kuiper","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lander-spacecraft","tag-local-history","tag-local-interstellar-cloud","tag-moon","tag-nasa-programs","tag-outer-space","tag-physical-sciences","tag-planetary-science","tag-science","tag-science-technology","tag-scientific-exploration","tag-solar-system","tag-space","tag-space-exploration","tag-space-missions","tag-space-probes","tag-space-research","tag-space-science","tag-space-vehicles","tag-spacecraft","tag-spaceflight","tag-uncrewed-spacecraft"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}