Tag Archives: moon

Lunar spelunking with robots at Vancouver’s (Canada) June 24, 2014 Café Scientifique

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Vancouver’s next Café Scientifique is being held in the back room of the The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.], Vancouver, Canada), on Tuesday, June 24,  2014 at 7:30 pm. Here’s the meeting description (from the June 18, 2014 announcement),

Our speaker for the evening will be John Walker, Rover Development Lead of the Hakuto Google Lunar X-Prize Team.  The title and abstract of his talk is:

Lunar Spelunking

Lava tubes, or caves likely exist on the surface of the moon. Based on recent images and laser distance measurements from the surface of the moon, scientists have selected candidates for further study.

Governmental space agencies and private institutions now have plans to visit these potential caves and investigate them as potential lunar habitat sites, as early as 2015.

I will present some of these candidates and my PhD research, which is supporting a Google Lunar X-Prize team’s attempt to survey one of these caves using robots.

I wasn’t able to find much about John Walker bu there is this Facebook entry noting a talk he gave at TEDxBudapest.

As for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, running a Google search yielded this on June 22, 2014 at 0945 hours PDT. It was the top finding on the search page. links to the site were provided below this definition:

The Google Lunar XPRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video,…

You can find the Google Lunar XPRIZE website here. The Hakuto team, the only one based in Japan (I believe), has a website here. There is some English language material but the bulk would appear to be Japanese language.

Glass bubbles on the moon contain nanoparticles

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There’s something quite charming about this June 12, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

A stunning discovery by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) soil scientist Marek Zbik of nano particles inside bubbles of glass in lunar soil could solve the mystery of why the moon’s surface topsoil has many unusual properties.

Dr Zbik, from Queensland University of Technology’s Science and Engineering Faculty, said scientists had long observed the strange behaviour of lunar soil but had not taken much notice of the nano and submicron particles found in the soil and their source was unknown.

Dr Zbik took the lunar soil samples to Taiwan where he could study the glass bubbles without breaking them using a new technique for studying nano materials call synchrotron-based nano tomography to look at the particles. Nano tomography is a transmission X-ray microscope which enables 3D images of nano particles to be made.

“We were really surprised at what we found,” Dr Zbik said.

“Instead of gas or vapour inside the bubbles, which we would expect to find in such bubbles on Earth, the lunar glass bubbles were filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles’ interior.

“It appears that the nano particles are formed inside bubbles of molten rocks when meteorites hit the lunar surface. Then they are released when the glass bubbles are pulverised by the consequent bombardment of meteorites on the moon’s surface.

“This continuous pulverising of rocks on the lunar surface and constant mixing develop a type of soil which is unknown on Earth.”

This video from the Queensland University of Technology is in 3-D (I believe this is the first I’ve hosted a 3-D video here),

Here’s more about this video and Zbik’s work from the YouTube page,

Discovery of possible source of the lunar regolith fine fraction from liberation of particles born within impact generated vesicles in the lunar impact glass. 3D image obtained using Transmission X-Ray Microscope (TXM), shown here as the anaglyph, reveals fine structure within vesicle in the lunar impact glass.
Marek S. Żbik, Yen-Fang Song, Chun-Chieh Wang, and Ray L. Frost, “Discovery of Discrete Structured Bubbles within Lunar Regolith Impact Glasses,” ISRN Astronomy and Astrophysics, (2012), Article ID 506187, 3 pages.

More details about the discovery can be found in the June 12, 2012 news item on Nanowerk or in the Queensland University of Technology June 12, 2012 news release,

“Lunar soil is electro-statically charged so it hovers above the surface; it is extremely chemically active; and it has low thermal conductivity eg it can be 160 degrees above the surface but -40 degrees two metres below the surface.

“It is also very sticky and brittle such that its particles wear the surface off metal and glass.”

I loved the video and watched it twice, all 17 secs. of it.