NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Alan Binder, Principal Investigator of NASA's Lunar Prospector mission, part 2 of 4

Well, about 10 years ago, a group of us got together and decided that the NASA missions had become far too expensive and far too costly and took far too long to do. I was a principal investigator on the Viking missions which landed the first unmanned missions on Mars in 1976. And that program took about six or seven years. Then I spent actually from 73 to 83 in Germany. I came back for the mission and missions that were starting to be developed in our left Germany were still not launched the time I came back from Germany. And they were costing a billion dollars or more. In fact, Hubble cost well over a billion was about two billion. Cassini which is on its way to Saturn right now costs three and a half

billion dollars. Mars observer which blew up about six years ago as you might recall just as it reached Mars was almost a billion dollars. And so we were spending a lot of money on very few missions that it took years to develop them. When I was a young graduate student there were rangers and surveyors going every few months and things were very active. And we felt that there was a need to demonstrate that small missions inexpensive missions that could be done quickly could produce very high science and start a new trend in doing these things. In addition, as you're well aware, man has not been on the moon for a well over a quarter of a century. And we wanted to get humanity back on the moon, get rekindled the interest in lunar science. And secondly, we wanted to demonstrate what we call the commercial viability of set submissions. I'd become convinced that the only way we're going to explore space and I mean all of space is with a commercial bent. You can do research the way NASA has done it, but the public needs to have a real payback and investors have a have a payback. So we had all these concepts in mind that we

wanted to demonstrate. So we started this program as a philanthropic effort, volunteer based, I had a small company called Lunar Exploration Inc. in Houston non-profit tax exam. We worked with a space studies institute in Princeton, New Jersey and with the National Space Society. And we all worked together and tried to do this mission. I defined the science, I defined the spacecraft that we wanted to develop. A very small amount of money was used from the space studies institute that was their contribution to go ahead and get a design of the spacecraft. Then we tried to sell the I.B. in the sense of get the aerospace community and whoever to help us do this. So we could show that you could do a mission for a few tens of millions of dollars. Let me cut that just for a second more and move a light. Sure. Okay, the three objectives of prospect, what are you? We wanted to demonstrate that you could do good science on a very small inexpensive spacecraft. We wanted to get people interested in exploring the moon again and we wanted to get man back

on the moon. We also wanted to prove that you could do it so cheaply it could be done in a commercial mode. Great, fantastic. How much did the mission cost? $63 million. I'm sorry. They're not going to hear my question. So the mission actual costs, the mission cost just $63 million which is about one tenth of what a NASA mission normally cost. How does that compare to say a single Apollo flight to the moon just to just give me a ballpark? Well, it depends on how you want to do that. The Apollo program was $26 billion when we had six missions so you could say it was $4 billion a shot. That's not quite the way book keep but that certainly would have cost. And this of course cost of mining fraction of that. What's the path that you took to the moon? I understand it was a very long, very slow which made it cheaper. Well, this was called a minimum energy trajectory. Apollo went there in 2.6 days because it had man on board and they also wanted what's called a free return. If you go to the

moon that quickly you can loop around the moon and come right back without any additional maneuvers. That cost you a lot of energy because you're well just like when you're driving a car you scream up to a stop sign and you'll slam on the brakes. We went there in 105 hours which is the minimum energy you can use to get there and still barely make it but then of course you don't have to slam on the brakes as hard. 105 hours is a sweat. Four and a half days. I thought it was like a month or so. No, no, no. Okay. September of this year press conference. You made an announcement about finding water at the poles. What's the significance of that? Well, the significance is that the prior... I'm sorry, the significance of the water. I'm sorry. I didn't know what was that program where you have to answer the correct thing with a jeopardy. The question is, the significance of finding water at the poles is very simple. We need it for life support and we need it for rocket fuel. The main engines of the shuttle

use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and of course that's what water is. You break it down into two components and you have the best chemical fuel there is. This means that we can go back to the moon to human-based exploration much more cheaply than we could if we had to take all the fuel with us which is what we did in Apollo. So it's it's easier to live and work on the moon if there's water there. Once you have water then you can do everything we'd like to do at a fraction of the cost maybe five percent or even less the cost. Fantastic. Okay, in what form is this water? The water is... oh yeah, I mean I always have to think I got to say the question first. The water that we found is located what we call permanently shattered regions. When you get very close to lunar poles there are craters where the sun never shines. In these areas the temperatures gets down to 80 degrees Kelvin which is about minus 190 centigrade. At those temperatures water is stable. Water ice is stable over the history of the solar system and we know water has been

brought to the moon by comets and carbonaceous conduits and some of it will have migrated the poles and be frozen out. Our data of course just map hydrogen. We know that there's hydrogen there there's an excess of hydrogen and we interpret that as being due to water ice. We obviously don't know exactly the form and so what I'm going to say is our speculation which has a good basis but it's not a fact. We think that when comets hit the moon for a relatively short time a period of tens of years maybe hundreds of years relatively thick layers of water ice are deposited in these areas and by relatively thick few feet maybe we don't know and then it gets buried and preserved and so we expect to when we go there that we will find layers of water mixed in with the soil. Why is it for the labors that no water has been found previously in all the years of analyzing the samples return samples? When the Apollo samples were brought back from the moon the first thing we found out was that they were devoid of water. Now let me kind of explain what that means.

If you go out and pick up a rock on the earth there might be just water in the rock in the sense of normal water. There are also forms of water add sort of water in which the water is actually sticking to the outside of the crystal then there is water as part of the crystalline structure in certain minerals. Okay those minerals that we find in the moon which on earth would have a water molecule actually an OH radical in them don't they have a chlorine or a fluorine and so we found that the moon was totally devoid of water. The moon was formed very very hot and so all the water all the atmosphere everything boiled off that could boil off. So that was the first thing we knew the moon had been born dry. The second point is the Apollo missions were all in the equatorial regions were very very hot and of course as I mentioned earlier you have to have these permanently shadowed regions for going to preserve any water that was brought to the moon. So it was a the absence of exploration in polar regions and b the fact that the moon is inherently devoid of water. All the water that we believe is there has been brought there since the moon formed.

How confident are you in your announcement? I think there was a question of this at the press conference and you had a very pithy answer. We are often asked how confident we are that this is water and I will give you two answers. At the first news conference I was asked how confident I was and I said very confident and they said well would you bet your house on the answer is yes and I was still bet my house on. How? I have to stop here without a film man. Oh. Okay. Great. Back in September the press conference the question arises about your confidence level in this climate. The question often comes up how confident are we that we found water since we do map hydrogen and we infer water. When we had our first press conference I was asked how confident are you and I and they asked would you bet your house and the answer is yes and I still would. However there's a second answer to this question that is we are looking at the possibility of

developing a commercial lunar base and of course we could put it where the water ice is. That's a $10 billion effort probably and we're not willing to bet $10 billion on a base without knowing absolutely that this is water so we do want follow-on missions a rover mission to go down and actually sample the water in the absolutely certain that this water but I'm confident in the terms of normal human activities. Would you have on the basis of a rover mission would you go ahead with the base or would you want a man there? We don't need a man. If things were ideal and you had the resources could do what you want. What the ideal sequence would be to put down a simple rover rover round enough to make sure that you have verified that it's water ice because if you just go to one spot you can hit a dry hole just like drilling for oil and you say well there's no water there. So you'd want to be able to sample or dig into several places but just like resource utilization on the earth when the oil companies go explore they do a detailed map of grid you know

to get the vertical distribution and the horizontal distribution of the reservoir of oil or the coal or whatever it is and if we had those kinds of capabilities and the funding to do it you would really want to do a complete detailed analysis of the volume of the resource. I don't know how to answer the question because you see those things cost money and there's a certain part where you say okay we know enough to move ahead and we'll have to decide that as we move into this next phase. Great fabulous. How would you harvest the ice and create water from it? Well that let me answer that by saying that if it is in layers of nearly pure water we think it is you simply dig it up it's very very cold of course that's why it's there and heat it up and any it'll just sublime or evaporate if you will and you condense it I made the comment during the first news conference while I was asked that it's just like the stealing whiskey or moonshine and that's all you really have to do it's heat it up and distill it and condense it.

Now could that be done by robots or in this phase you're talking about do we be able to do it? If we're going to do these types of things you're talking about developing an industrial capability you'd have an industrial complex not only to get the water but to start working with the soils to break them down into oxygen the metals and things of that nature so you can't just go grab it and take a little bit you're if you're going to have people living and working on the new start you have to start harvesting large amounts and so this is a major effort. What do you say to Jack Schmidt who says that the finding is not confirmed I mean you say of course it's not confirmed but he says it's solar hydrogen deposits what's your answer to that argument? Okay this is going to be a little more involved obviously I can't answer this simply okay the question of is this water or is it solar-winning planet hydrogen is a valid one first of all let me explain that when the lunar samples were brought back to soil samples we found that there was a hundred 50 to a hundred parts per million of hydrogen in the soils what happens

is solar wind which consists of protons and electrons and the proton is basically a hydrogen atom slamming of the moon going about three thousand kilometers a second and the individual particles then sort of bury themselves in the grains of soil while there's an equilibrium value because after a while you saturate and then that's why we have this 50 to a hundred parts per million. Harrison Schmidt has suggested that the reason there may be more hydrogen at the poles is it's colder and the equilibrium value of course would be higher and hence we're just seeing excess hydrogen we do not believe this is a case for a relatively complex reason we are measuring the three parts of the neutron spectrum there's the high energy or fast neutrons that we measure we are then measuring the intermediate or epithermal neutrons we're also measuring the thermal energy neutrons we see the signal which we know is due to a hydrogen in the epithermal part of the signal we should also see a similar signal a decrease in the flux of particles from the moon

in the fast neutron flux we don't see that how do we answer that well the epithermal come from up to a half a meter or a little more deep in the moon where the high energy or fast neutrons come from the outer 20 30 40 centimeters roughly a foot the fact that we don't see any in that outer foot or so means that the whatever it is is buried by a foot of soil well you see solar wind is deposited on the top of the regolith and so why would you have it below the top and nothing in upper regions it just doesn't make any sense secondly there are radar observations of mercury were made several years ago showing that there are similar deposits near the poles of mercury we find out too that these deposits are covered by a butterfly of mercury soil and so we have exactly the same analog here you have one more piece of information and that is that earth radar can actually look into the permanently shattered regions of the moon because even though the

sun can't get in there the moon wobbles up and down with respect to the earth by plus or minus seven degrees and hence radar can look down in these areas they do not see any water yes what's going on here well the difference between mercury and the moon is that the mercury soils are basically devoid of any iron or fe oh iron oxide well the lunar soils are quite rich comparatively in these things that iron stops the radar from penetrating very far in the terrestrial case so all these pieces of evidence taken together to say that whatever bill and I are seeing in the moon is buried below a foot or so of soil if it's buried that doesn't make sense it was brought in from the top so we think comments hit the moon they deposit a layer of ice but not now you understand they don't hit there and are right there they hit elsewhere in the molecules move around and get deposit like frost in the morning on your car and then if it isn't buried by another impact a few tens of millions or so years later that goes away it is

sputtered away by the solar wind particles themselves so this is a long chain of you know thought it's unverified because we simply see hydrogen and that's the reason we want to go down on the surface drill holes in several places and see if it's truly water great put you know okay rolling all right how big is the moon in terms I can understand and did we explore it the moon's surface area is equivalent to north and south america combined it's a big place have we explored it happens no geologists have been studying the earth for over 300 years and I don't know I had thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of geologists have explored the earth and we're still doing it we had six crews as 12 men spent exactly three working days on the surface of the moon in the area near the quater on the front side so we haven't touched

it's a total fallacy to think just because you can look up and see it but you get two three rocks and you understand it's a complete world fabulous okay quarter of a century since Apollo what have we done with that quarter of a century well it's been a quarter of a century since man was on the moon in the Apollo program of course we have done nothing in the meantime until Clementine which was the DOD satellite which was used to test military hardwareing it's not just for a moment we lost we lost the guy back there I'd like to get him back there same silver I think maybe done with work where's the guy who was sitting there go on hold for 25 years it's been 25 years since man was on the moon during the Apollo program and we not only did nothing during that time but of course we threw away the technology we stopped building Saturn 5s we don't build limbs all that technology is basically lost you remember about 10 years ago president bush announced

the space exploration initiative and said we wanted to put man back on the moon permanently and go to Mars I was doing some of the study work at Johnson Space Center in those days as a as a Lockheed employee and the first thing we said is can we get the Saturn 5 plans and start building again the answer was no plans don't exist anymore and of course all the subcontractors are gone the technology is different and so we're going to build a Saturn 5 again you'd have to start from scratch it was take you again seven eight nine years to develop so we threw away a tremendous capability and just stopped in our tracks because people didn't understand the value of the moon what it meant to humanity not only scientifically but for the future of mankind unbelievable put this in perspective in terms of the arc of your career where were you beginning and in your desire 25 years ago and where are you at now when I was much younger a long time ago I was a graduate student of course and a student when this all began and I wanted to be in a Apollo astronaut and go to the moon I still want to go to the moon if I have the chance I will certainly

do so because we effectively shut down at the end of Apollo and Apollo as you know I think was terminate early there were several more missions that were going to fly and that hardware unfortunately is simply law and ordinance at the Johnson Space Center at the Cape and I think at Huntsville so we had three complete vehicles capable of going to the moon which are thrown away 25 years passed and now we are at the point where instead of putting man on the moon the best we can do and I'm very proud of it naturally is put a 300 pound satellite in orbit so we're starting over again and NASA has called lunar prospect of mission rediscovering the moon because we are restarting this entire process we're not starting from zero of course because we have a tremendous knowledge basis and we have a lot of technology at hand and that's why I was able to do prospector so quickly and so cheaply because that's all been around for some time but we're starting over again and I fully hope that we will continue and go right back to the moon and build a lunar base

and start the first extraterrestrial civilization what's the encouraging thing about John we're going to film right there okay great perfect time two two three two two three coming up I'm going to ask you whether you'd like to come sure you know the answer Dubai has gone in that hole and said all right I want to see hands like you brought two questions are we alone are there other earth-like planets all right let me see hands are we alone what percentage of the hands give you to guess my shoot up as a yes practically none no okay and if I said are there are there any earths out there oh everyone say yes I would think so well I mean you know you have to why do you do what you do

yeah yeah exactly and you know the even when we're equibbling over probabilities there are just so many stars now if you asked a question have we ever been visited by an alien life form everyone raised a hand say no or you know do we have is there another earth within five light years well you know then there are some optimists might raise their hand but when you look at the number of stars it's you you have to have in my mind a pretty warp for you not to think that there isn't at least many other systems that look very much like our own great I think we're all set can I get to thirty seconds room tell well can I ask one one silly question sure we're asking everybody uh what were you doing July 20th 1969 oh my I was crawling and include his question oh yes July 20th 1969 I was probably crawling

how old were you back how about six months old I know I know we're changing but I don't know if you want to get that on I think we're out of thank you very very much okay great thank you tell me when you first started the initialization sequence russia all right I'm going to go up that stupid thing I hate main data main data torture why do you hate it that it's so bad it's a nice little display why aren't because it's just clutter's up your sweater's up my screen as if your screen weren't cluttered already all right gentlemen we're 13 hours 43 minutes we'll be coming out of the eclipse

and back more now you this you want to do it tomorrow that's right that's right all right all right well so we came out when they try with the people of the s-boss 1440 what would you like to know the eclipse exit time following 1443 the eclipse exit would be at 1448 okay that sounds about right I'm configured and I have lots of 40 data to look at yeah me too what do you call that red over it's all dead this is a our little science instruments are off

scared you didn't it no while that red was there you don't shake your head no um

yeah oh yeah you still mumbling Rick no you must understood are you mumbling oh yes that's what I thought okay we did it Jolly or I need to reconnect Larry give it up you're getting neurotic it actually did base difference you can see where they clean and where they

did you getting a BTS right getting a troll up here next we just went into the side this is all wild all wild sound that you're hearing

bye no joy when I started up it says waiting for CLPM to connect with me hey the control, help him it's

they do know this is the same don't they? yeah no I mean not you guys I'll feed that now yeah I noticed that if we were to start up we could see LPM or waiting for VCC CLPM to connect to the CND you