ST. LOUIS — A team of astronomers has cooked
up an out-of-this-world recipe for lunar concrete that could be used to build homes
on the moon.
The innovative
recipe of carbon, glue and moon dust, which produces what looks like a hockey
puck, could also be helpful in building other structures on the moon, including
giant telescopes and solar power arrays.
Lunar
living aside, many astrophysicists think that large telescopes
on the moon have their advantages: The moon lacks the clouds and blurring
atmosphere that can distort images taken from ground-based observatories. In
addition, the moon offers a permanent and stable platform — the lunar surface.
One
limiting factor for making the concrete could be the amount of material a
rocket can reasonably haul up to the moon. But if the bulk of the material was
already on the moon, that would lighten the Earth-to-moon payload. And that is
the case, Chen says.
"We
could make huge telescopes on the moon relatively easily, and avoid the large
expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth," said Peter Chen of
NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Catholic University
of America in Washington, D.C. "Since most of the materials are already
there in the form of dust, you don't have to bring very much stuff with you,
and that saves a ton of money."
Chen also
notes that like concrete on Earth, the lunar type could have many uses.
"We
could build structures on the moon, perhaps habitats
for astronauts on the moon, maybe igloos," Chen said during a press
briefing here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Lunar
concrete
To arrive
at the concrete recipe, Chen and his Goddard colleagues including Douglas
Rabin, mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxies (glue-like
materials) with simulated lunar dust, or crushed rock that has the same
composition and grain size as dust on the moon.
After
several iterations, one of which yielded what Chen described as "gooey and
smelly," the team created a strong material with the consistency of
concrete. Next, they coated the material with epoxy and spun the wet lunar
concrete to form a 12-inch-wide (30-centimeter-wide) bowl-like structure shaped
like a telescope mirror.
"After
that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of
aluminum, and voilà, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror," Rabin
said. "Our method could be scaled-up on the moon, using the ubiquitous
lunar dust."
Giant
lunar observatory
To build a
telescope the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, Chen suggests scaling up the
recipe to about 130 pounds (60 kilograms) of epoxy and 1.3 tons, or 2,600
pounds (nearly 1,200 kg) of lunar dust.
Chen and
Rabin envision creating
a telescope mirror spanning 164 feet (50 meters) in diameter on the moon.
Such an observatory would dwarf the largest optical telescope in the world —
the 34-foot (10.4-meter) Gran Telescopio Canarias, also called the Great
Telescope Canary Islands.
A monster
telescope or two such telescopes working in concert on the moon could help in
the search for extrasolar planets and make detailed observations of distant
galaxies, Chen said.
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