Astronomy Science Investigation

Science Investigation
Unit: Science and Society-Astronomy
Name:______________________________
Class Period/Block:_______________
Date:__________________
Focus Question: Considering the costs and the benefits, is space exploration worth the risks?
I.
Preview
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2015/02/09/presidents-2016-budget-pictures/
1. What did you notice that you didnt expect?
2. What can you learn from examining this?
3. What do you wonder aboutwho?
II.
Investigation
Cite Text Evidence

Source
Cite specific textual evidence

to support analysis of science
and technical texts
(Who, What, When, Where)

Who:
The Ethics of Colonizing
Mars
Notes and Quotes (Evidence)

Analyze the author's purpose in
providing an explanation, describing
a procedure, or discussing an
experiment in a text
(Why was it written)
How do you know this

document is a reliable source?
(Is it a reliable source for
answering the focus question?)
Compare and contrast the information
gained from experiments, simulations, video,
or multimedia sources with that gained from
reading a text on the same topic.
Why:
I know this is/is not a reliable source in

helping me answer the focus question
because
Why:

because
What:
When:
Where:
Who:
Why is Pluto not a
planet?
What:
When:
Where:
Cite Text Evidence

Source

and technical texts

Who:
Predictions of Alien Life

experiment in a text (Why was it
written)

Why:

because
Why:

because
What:
When:
Where:
Who:
Moon Mining
What:
When:
Where:
Cite Text Evidence

Source

and technical texts

Who:
What:
Provide a research source
on your own.
List website here:
When:
Where:

experiment in a text (Why was it
written)
Why:


because
Report Findings (Thesis)

Formulate a thesis to answer the focus question.
o Does it make sense? Is it clear and concise?
o Is it specific to the topic?
o Does it clearly state exactly what I talk about in the paper?
III.
Report Findings (Essay)
o Writing to Inform-answering the question and citing ideas and information from the documents clearly and
accurately.
o Writing arguments-to support a claim/thesis based on the analysis and citation of the documents.
Writing tips:
Use thesis to guide your writing
Cite at least 1-3 examples from all sources
Use appropriate language and punctuation
Argumentative Writing Rubric Social Studies
Thesis/Main Claim &
Introduction
WHST.6-8.1a
Use supporting evidence and

develop claims
WHST.6-8.1b
Integrate and Cite Sources

WHST.6-8.8
Conclusion
WHST.6-8.1e
Formal style
4 Advanced
3 Proficient
2 Basic
1 Below Basic
Clear and significant claim about a

topic or issue is introduced.
Accurately distinguishes the claim
from alternate or opposing claims.
The reasons and evidence are
organized logically.
Understandable claim about a topic

or issue is introduced. Somewhat
distinguishes the claim from
alternate or opposing claims.
Reasons and evidence are
organized adequately.
Main claim about a topic or issue is

unclear or vague. Distinguishes the
claim from alternate or opposing
claims limitedly. Reasons and
evidence are sometimes unclear or
inaccurate.
Improper or unclear claim about a

topic or issue is introduced.
Distinguishing the claim from
alternate or opposing claims lacking.
The reasons and evidence are rarely
or never organized.
Significant support of claim(s) with

logical reasoning and relevant,
accurate data and evidence that
demonstrate an understanding of the
topic or text, using superior sources.
Adequate support of claim(s) with

logical reasoning and essential data
and evidence that demonstrate an
understanding of the topic or text,
using mostly credible sources.
Seldom supports claim(s) with

vague reasoning and unclear data
and evidence that demonstrate a
minimal understanding of the topic
or text, using somewhat credible
sources.
Rarely or never supports claim(s)

with logical reasoning and relevant,
accurate data and evidence that
demonstrate no or limited
understanding of the topic or text,
using random sources or none at all.
Properly assesses the credibility and

accuracy of each source. Always
quotes or paraphrases the data and
conclusions of others while
avoiding plagiarism. Clearly
follows a standard format for
citation (footnotes preferred).
Adequately assesses the credibility

and accuracy of each source.
Sometimes quotes or paraphrases
the data and conclusions of others
while mostly avoiding plagiarism.
To some degree follows a standard
format for citation (footnotes
preferred).
Limitedly/minimally assesses the

credibility and accuracy of each
source. Seldom quotes or
paraphrases the data and
conclusions of others while rarely
avoiding plagiarism. Sometimes
follows a standard format for
citation (footnotes preferred).
Rarely assesses the credibility and

accuracy of each source.
Inadequately quotes or paraphrases
the data and conclusions of others
while no attempt to avoid plagiarism
is apparent. Does not follow a
standard format for citation
(footnotes preferred).
Clearly provides a concluding

statement or section that follows
from and supports the argument
presented.
Adequately provides a concluding

statement or section that follows
from and supports the argument
presented.
Concluding statement or section that

follows from and supports the
argument presented is somewhat
unclear or improper.
A concluding statement or section

that follows from and supports the
argument is inappropriate or
lacking.
Properly establishes and maintains a

formal style.
Adequately establishes and

maintains a formal style.
Minimally establishes and maintains

a formal style.
Formal style is unclear or limited.
WHST.6-8.1d
Reviewers Comments
Sources
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2015/02/09/presidents-2016-budget-pictures/
Would It Be Ethical To Colonize Mars?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetstemwedel/2015/09/30/would-it-be-ethical-tocolonize-mars/#9f1f8ca6b82d
SEP 30, 2015 @ 01:49 PM 7,734 VIEWS
Janet D. Stemwedel
This undated photo provided by NASA and taken by an instrument aboard the agencys Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter shows dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks on the surface of Mars that
scientists believe were caused by flowing streams of salty water. Researchers said Monday, Sept.
28, 2015, that the latest observations strongly support the longtime theory that salt water in liquid
form flows down certain Martian slopes each summer. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona via AP)
With the recent discovery of flowing liquid water on Mars , talk has turned to what it would take to
colonize Mars. But before you pack your bags, its worth thinking about whether we should colonize
Mars.
Here I am not arguing for a definitive answer to that question. Rather, I consider some of the ethical
implications of a human outpost on the red planet, implications whose contemplation should be
central to our space strategy rather than an afterthought.
Potential harm to Martian life forms.
Probably the strongest ethical argument against colonizing Mars would be if such colonization had the
potential to harm any indigenous life forms that might be on Mars. Of course, we are not aware of any
such life forms at the moment. The discovery of liquid water (and indications that the Martian surface
may once have had much more of it) raises the possibility that there might have been life on Mars in
the past. Life forms that once were, but are no longer, are probably immune to harmful impacts from
Earthling settlement on Mars.
But what about indigenous life forms that havent happened yet? What if there are processes
happening right now through which life on Mars could emerge? If Earthling settlement would disrupt
these processes, is that a harm we ought to avoid? More generally, do we have ethical obligations to
potential life forms?
This question gets into ethical territory that is contentious among Earthlings, who dont always agree
about our obligations to potential humans on a timescale of nine months or of several generations.
Im not sure the ethical disagreements get any clearer just because we have them on a different planet.
hotos: he Cities With The Most Billionaires
And even if moral intuitions were clear and uniform, heres another challenge: What is the moral
status of life forms different enough from the ones we have on Earth that we might fail to recognize
them as life in the first place? In the interests of extreme galactic biodiversity, would there be on
obligation not to harm anything that might be alive (and to assume that our methods for assessing
whats alive in our early encounters with Martian life are likely to give false negatives)? Does our
sense of moral community only extend to life forms that sufficiently resemble Earth life forms? Would
we recognize exotic Martian life forms as alive if they had the weaponry to make us?
Potential harmful impacts on Earth.
Even if Mars is a lifeless planet, whether its ethical to colonize Mars may depend on what kinds of
consequences the mission has here on Earth. The machinery of space travel uses natural resources. It
generates waste products. It shifts funds away from other projects or purposes.
The ethical issue here is not just the magnitude of the costs of a colonization mission relative to the
benefits of establishing a Mars colony. Its also a matter of how those costs and benefits are
distributed of whether the people who bear the costs will also enjoy the benefits.
Indeed, the social impacts of colonizing Mars may provide the most difficult ethical terrain. If a Mars
colony holds the promise of a new start, an escape from messes we have created on our home planet,
we need to consider the fairness of who gets to escape and who is left behind to deal with the mess.
Even years prior to any realistic hope of a crewed mission to Mars, we might weigh the impacts of
shifting scientific and engineering brainpower to this challenge and away from addressing other
human aspirations and needs, some of them quite pressing.
At the very least, we should think through the ethical implications of a project likely to benefit few
people directly. Will it help Earthbound humans to address disease, climate change, war, social and
economic inequality? Will it undercut efforts to address these issues?
Potential harmful impacts on the solar system.
Any mission of colonization from Earth to Mars takes for granted the larger environment of the solar
system in which both planets maintain orbits. If the mission generates enough space junk to make
future space travel hazardous, or involves engineering projects on Mars that end up disrupting the
gravitational balance between heavenly bodies, that could be bad, both for the colonists and for folks
back on Earth. It doesnt strike me as a likely consequence, but someone should surely do the
calculations on this before any major Martian infrastructure projects commence.
Impacts on the pristine Martian environment.
Lets say even under our most expansive definition of life Mars turns out to be lifeless. Might we still
have an obligation to preserve the pristine Martian environment?
Arguably, leaving the Martian environment in its current state might be of instrumental value (e.g., to
scientists studying the natural geological history of the planet, or to sky-gazers). Surely, there would
be something distasteful about marring the Martian landscape with a billboard visible from Earth.
But is there more than instrumental value at stake here? If we have such an obligation, it strikes me as
an extreme version of the position that we have ethical obligations to nature itself, regardless of its
instrumental value to us. We usually think of nature as including various sorts of living things. Does a
lifeless landscape have intrinsic value that places ethical obligations on us? Those who hold that it
does should sharpen their argument while Mars is still pristine.
Should we assume that Mars is ours?
Even if we can work out the technical challenges around establishing a Mars colony, do we need it?
What if some other inhabitants of the galaxy need Mars more (perhaps because their world has been
destroyed) but we happened to get there first. Would we have an obligation to help them out by
sharing Mars, or by ceding it to them and going back to Earth? Should we be thinking of Mars as a
shared resource?
Who else do we imagine might need it, and for what? Maybe the real reason to protect the pristine
Martian environment is in order to cultivate restraint in ourselves, rather than feeding our rapacious
appetite for conquest.
Just because we have the technical capacity to do something doesnt mean that weshould do it.
Sending a crewed mission or human colonists to Mars is an expensive and risky undertaking if the
goal just amounts to having Mars for our own.
Why is Pluto no longer a planet?

By Library of Congress, "Everyday Mysteries"
Why is Pluto no longer a planet?
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto

to that of a dwarf planet because it did not meet the three criteria the IAU
uses to define a full-sized planet. Essentially Pluto meets all the criteria
except one- it has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.
In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of "dwarf planet." This
means that from now on only the rocky worlds of the inner Solar System and the gas giants of the outer system will be
designated as planets. The inner Solar System is the region of space that is smaller than the radius of Jupiters orbit around the
sun. It contains the asteroid belt as well as the terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The gas giants of course
are Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. So now we have eight planets instead of the nine we used to have.
What is a Dwarf Planet?
A dwarf planet, as defined by the IAU, is a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough that its shape is
controlled by gravitational forces rather than mechanical forces (and is thus ellipsoid in shape), but has not cleared its
neighboring region of other objects.
So, the three criteria of the IAU for a full-sized planet are:
1. It is in orbit around the Sun.
2. It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).
3. It has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.
Pluto meets only two of these criteria, losing out on the third. In all the billions of years it has lived there, it has not managed to
clear its neighborhood. You may wonder what that means, not clearing its neighboring region of other objects? Sounds like a
minesweeper in space! This means that the planet has become gravitationally dominant -- there are no other bodies of
comparable size other than its own satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence, in its vicinity in space.
So any large body that does not meet these criteria is now classed as a dwarf planet, and that includes Pluto, which shares its
orbital neighborhood with Kuiper belt objects such as the plutinos.
History of Pluto
The object formerly known as the planet Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff,
Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, with contributions from William H. Pickering. This period in astronomy was one of
intense planet hunting, and Pickering was a prolific planet predictor.
In 1906, Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian who had founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894, started an
extensive project in search of a possible ninth planet, which he termed "Planet X." By 1909, Lowell and Pickering had suggested
several possible celestial coordinates for such a planet. Lowell and his observatory conducted the search until his death in 1916,
to no avail. Unknown to Lowell, on March 19, 1915, his observatory had captured two faint images of Pluto, but they were not
recognized for what they were. Lowell was not the first to unknowingly photograph Pluto. There are sixteen known prediscoveries, with the oldest being made by the Yerkes Observatory on August 20, 1909.
The search for Planet X did not resume until 1929, when the job was handed to Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old Kansan who had
just arrived at the Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh's task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs taken
two weeks apart, then examine each pair and determine whether any objects had shifted position. Using a machine called a blink
comparator, he rapidly shifted back and forth between views of each of the plates to create the illusion of movement of any
objects that had changed position or appearance between photographs. On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching,
Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and January 29 of that year. After
the observatory obtained further confirmatory photographs, news of the discovery was telegraphed to the Harvard College
Observatory on March 13, 1930.
The discovery made headlines across the globe. The Lowell Observatory, which had the right to name the new object, received
over 1,000 suggestions from all over the world; the name Pluto was proposed by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in
Oxford, England. Venetia was interested in classical mythology as well as astronomy, and considered the name for the god of
the underworld appropriate for such a presumably dark and cold world. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather
Falconer Madan, a former librarian at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. Madan passed the name to Professor Herbert
Hall Turner, who then cabled it to colleagues in the United States. Pluto officially became Pluto on March 24, 1930. The name
was announced on May 1, 1930, and Venetia received five pounds (5) as a reward.
International Astronomical Union (IAU): Pluto and the Developing Landscape of our Solar System - A discussion about
Pluto from IAU that includes a history, references to how a planet is defined and a link to the report on the final resolution.
Also included are questions and answers aboutPlanets, Dwarf Planets, and Small Solar System Bodies.
The Girl Who Named a Planet - This is an article about Venetia (Burney) Phair, the girl who named the planet Pluto.
NOVA: The Pluto Files - Watch the PBS program which features Neil deGrasse Tyson exploring the rise and fall of Americas
favorite planet.
Solar System Exploration: Pluto - NASA provides an abundance of information about Pluto such as facts, images, headline
news, and a video.
Signs of Alien Life Will Be Found by 2025, NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | April 7, 2015 04:50pm ET
- See more at: http://www.space.com/29041-alien-life-evidence-by-2025-nasa.html#sthash.oKod3MGL.dpuf
http://www.space.com/29041-alien-life-evidence-by-2025-nasa.html
Recent observations by planetary probes and telescopes on the ground and in space have shown that water is common throughout our solar
system and the broader Milky Way galaxy.
Credit: NASA
Humanity is on the verge of discovering alien life, high-ranking NASA scientists say.
"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30
years," NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said Tuesday (April 7) during a panel discussion that focused on the space agency's efforts to search for
habitable worlds and alien life.
"We know where to look. We know how to look," Stofan added during the event, which was webcast live. "In most cases we have the technology,
and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road." [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
Former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, shared Stofan's optimism, predicting that signs
of life will be found relatively soon both in our own solar system and beyond.
"I think we're one generation away in our solar system, whether it's on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a
nearby star," Grunsfeld said during Tuesday's event.
Many habitable environments

Recent discoveries suggest that the solar system and broader Milky Way galaxy teem with environments that could support life as we know it,
Grunsfeld said.
For example, oceans of liquid water slosh beneath the icy shells of the Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede, as well as that of the Saturn satellite
Enceladus. Oceans covered much of Mars in the ancient past, and seasonal dark streaks observed on the Red Planet's surface today may be
caused by salty flowing water.
Further, NASA's Curiosity rover has found carbon-containing organic molecules and "fixed" nitrogen, basic ingredients necessary for Earth-like life,
on the Martian surface.
Farther afield, observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope suggest that nearly every star in the sky hosts planets and many of these worlds
may be habitable. Indeed, Kepler's work has shown that rocky worlds like Earth and Mars are probably more common throughout the galaxy than
gas giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.
And just as the solar system is awash in water, so is the greater galaxy, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.
The Milky Way is "a soggy place," Hertz said during Tuesday's event. "We can see water in the interstellar clouds from which planetary systems and
stellar systems form. We can see water in the disks of debris that are going to become planetary systems around other stars, and we can even see
comets being dissipated in other solar systems as [their] star evaporates them." [6 Most Likely Places for Alien Life in the Solar System]
Looking for life

Hunting for evidence of alien life is a much trickier proposition than identifying potentially habitable environments. But researchers are working
steadily toward that more involved and ambitious goal, Stofan and others said.
For example, the agency's next Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2020, will search for signs of past life and cache samples for a possible return to
Earth for analysis. NASA also aims to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s a step Stofan regards as key to the search for Mars life.
"I'm a field geologist; I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils," Stofan said. "Those are hard to find. So I have a bias that it's eventually
going to take humans on the surface of Mars field geologists, astrobiologists, chemists actually out there looking for that good evidence of life
that we can bring back to Earth for all the scientists to argue about."
NASA is also planning out a mission to Europa, which may launch as early as 2022. The main goal of this $2.1 billion mission will be to shed light on
the icy moon's potential habitability, but it could also search for signs of alien life: Agency officials are considering ways to sample and study the
plumes of water vapor that apparently erupt from Europa's south polar region.
In the exoplanet realm, the agency's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an $8.8 billion instrument scheduled to launch in 2018, will scope out
the atmospheres of nearby "super-Earth" alien planets, looking for gases that may have been produced by life.
JWST will scan the starlight that passes through the air of super-Earths, which are more massive than our own planet but significantly less so than
gaseous worlds such as Uranus and Neptune. This method, called transit spectroscopy, will likely not work for potentially habitable Earth-size
worlds, Hertz said.
Searching for biosignature gases on small, rocky exoplanets will instead probably require direct imaging of these worlds, using a "coronagraph" to
block out the overwhelming glare of their parent stars, Hertz added.
NASA's potential Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which may launch in the mid-2020s if given the official go-ahead, would include a
coronagraph for exoplanet observations.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer

Michael was a science writer for the Idaho National Laboratory and has been an intern at Wired.com, The Salinas Californian newspaper, and the
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has also worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the
University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University
of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Mike on Google+.
Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Is Moon Mining Economically Feasible?

By Leonard David, Space.com's Space Insider Columnist | January 7, 2015 07:11am ET
http://www.space.com/28189-moon-mining-economic-feasibility.html
The moon offers a wealth of resources that may fuel a near-Earth/moon industrial infrastructure. This mosaic view of the near side of Earth's moon
comes from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's camera system, the LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC). The moon's diameter is 2,159 miles
(3,474 kilometers).
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
The moon may offer pay dirt with a rewarding mother lode of resources, a celestial gift that is literally up for grabs. But what's
really there for the taking, and at what cost?
A new assessment of whether or not there's an economic case for mining the moon has been put forward by Ian Crawford, a
professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College, London. His appraisal is to appear in a forthcoming issue of
the journal Progress in Physical Geography.
Crawford said it's hard to identify any single lunar resource that will be sufficiently valuable to drive a lunar resource extraction
industry on its own. Nonetheless, he said the moon does possess abundant raw materials that are of potential economic interest.
[Home On the Moon: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Infographic)]
Advertisement
Lunar resources could be used to help build up an industrial infrastructure in near-Earth space, Crawford said, a view shared by
space scientist Paul Spudis of the Lunar Planetary Institute and others.
"If the moon's resources are going to be helpful, they are going to be helpful beyond the surface of the moon itself," Crawford
said. Still, the overall case for any future payoff from exploiting the moon's resources has yet to be made, Crawford said.
"It's quite complicated," he told Space.com. "It's not simple at all."
Vanishing resource
One bit of skepticism from Crawford concerns helium-3. Advocates envision mining the moon for this isotope of helium, which
gets embedded in the upper layer of lunar regolith by the solar wind over billions of years. Hauling back the stuff from the moon
could power still-to-be-built nuclear fusion reactors here on Earth, advocates say.
"It doesn't make sense, the whole helium-3 argument," Crawford said. Strip-mining the lunar surface over hundreds of square
kilometers would produce lots of helium-3, he said, but the substance is a limited resource.
"It's a fossil fuel reserve. Like mining all the coal or mining all the oil, once you've mined it it's gone," Crawford said. The
investment required and infrastructure necessary to help solve the world's future energy needs via moon-extracted helium-3 is
enormous and might better be used to develop genuinely renewable energy sources on Earth, he added.
"It strikes me that, as far as energy is concerned, there are better things one should be investing in. So I'm skeptical for that
reason. But that doesn't mean that I don't think the moon, in the long-term, is economically useful," Crawford said.
But Crawford has a caveat about helium-3: Estimates for the abundance of the isotope are based on Apollo moon samples
brought back from the low latitudes of the moon.
"It's possible that helium-3 and other solar-windimplanted ions, like hydrogen, may be in a higher abundance in the cold regolith
near the lunar poles. That would be an important measurement to make and would require a polar lander," Crawford said.
Such information would increase researchers' knowledge, not only of the helium-3 inventory, but also possibly of useful solar
wind-implanted elements, like helium-4, as well as hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen resources, he added.
Consistent story
A top of the list, must-do action item, Crawford said, is determining how much water is truly locked up within the moon's polar
craters.
Human prospectors have already been on the moon. Apollo 17's Jack Schmitt, a geologist, is shown during his 1972 mission gauging the off-Earth
bounty of resources.
Credit: NASA
Remote sensing of the moon from orbiting spacecraft, including radar data, is telling a consistent story about this resource, which
can be processed into oxygen and rocket fuel. [Water on the Moon: What It Could Mean for Exploration (Video)]
"But to really get to the bottom of it, we need in-situ [on-the-spot] measurements from the surface at the lunar poles," Crawford
said. "It's first on my list [of necessary steps] and when we have an answer to that, we can plan accordingly."
Rare earth elements
Better knowledge of the availability of rare earth elements on the moon would also be valuable, Crawford said.
"It's entirely possible that when we really explore the moon properly we will find higher concentrations of some of these materials
materials that are not resolvable by orbital remote sensing," he said. The moon might harbor concentrations of rare earth
elements such as uranium and thorium as well as other useful materials that we're not aware of today in small,
geographically restricted areas, he said,
"To explore the whole moon at the level of detail required, that's a big undertaking," Crawford said. "But long term, we should be
keeping an open mind to that."
Crashed asteroids
In rounding out his lunar resource listing, Crawford points to the high-value platinum-group elements. As space researcher Dennis
Wingo and others previously pointed out, a lot of metallic asteroids have pummeled the moon over the eons. Locating those
impactors could lead lunar prospectors to big yields of valuable platinum-group elements, Crawford said.
In coming years, government-sponsored and private-sector spacecraft will land on the moon. This image shows a resource prospector carrying a
Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) experiment. The intent of the effort is to find, characterize
and map ice and other substances in almost permanently shadowed areas of the moon.
Credit: NASA
"If you're just interested in platinum group elements, you would probably go and mine the asteroids," Crawford said. "On the
other hand, if going to the moon for scavenging polar volatiles, rare earth elements then the impact sites of crashed asteroids
could offer an added bonus."
"So you add all of these things together, [then] even without helium-3, you can start to see that the moon might become of
economic interest in the longer term. That's my take," Crawford concluded.
Time to demonstrate
How should humanity demonstrate the collection, extraction and utilization of lunar resources? And when should this happen?
"Lunar resource exploration should be based on the same methods that have guided humans on their centuries-old exploration of
terrestrial resources," said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines in
Golden, Colorado.
Abbud-Madrid told Space.com that here on Earth, resource discovery is quickly followed by drilling, excavation, extraction and
processing operations to enable the utilization of those resources.
"For the moon, sufficient prospecting through remote sensing and identification of valuable resources, such as oxygen and
hydrogen for in-situ applications, has been done to date," Abbud-Madrid said. Based on these findings, he said, the necessary
technologies and prototypes to collect and extract these elements have been developed and tested on terrestrial analog sites.
For example, NASA's Resource Prospector Mission, a concept mission aiming for launch in 2018, would verify the feasibility of
lunar resource extraction, as would several other mission concepts from the private sector, Abbud-Madrid said. Such work, in
turn, will pave the way to incorporating In Situ Resource Utilization, known as ISRU, in future exploration planning, he said.
"Thus, the time has come to demonstrate these systems on the surface of the moon," Abbud-Madrid concluded.
To read Ian Crawford's "Lunar Resources: A Review Paper," go here.
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the
National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin's 2013 book "Mission to Mars My Vision for Space Exploration"
published by National Geographic with a new updated paperback version to be released in May of this year. Follow us
@Spacedotcom,Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
- See more at: http://www.space.com/28189-moon-mining-economic-feasibility.html#sthash.SrIWJg1h.dpuf

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Astronomy Science Investigation

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Science Investigation

Unit: Science and Society-Astronomy

1. What did you notice that you didnt expect?

2. What can you learn from examining this?

3. What do you wonder aboutwho?

Cite Text Evidence

Cite specific textual evidence

(Who, What, When, Where)

Notes and Quotes (Evidence)

(Why was it written)

How do you know this

I know this is/is not a reliable source in

I know this is/is not a reliable source in

Cite Text Evidence

Cite specific textual evidence

(Who, What, When, Where)

Notes and Quotes (Evidence)

How do you know this

I know this is/is not a reliable source in

I know this is/is not a reliable source in

Cite Text Evidence

Cite specific textual evidence

(Who, What, When, Where)

Notes and Quotes (Evidence)

How do you know this

I know this is/is not a reliable source in

Report Findings (Thesis)

Report Findings (Essay)

Use supporting evidence and

Integrate and Cite Sources

Clear and significant claim about a

Understandable claim about a topic

Main claim about a topic or issue is

Improper or unclear claim about a

Significant support of claim(s) with

Adequate support of claim(s) with

Seldom supports claim(s) with

Rarely or never supports claim(s)

Properly assesses the credibility and

Adequately assesses the credibility

Limitedly/minimally assesses the

Rarely assesses the credibility and

Clearly provides a concluding

Adequately provides a concluding

Concluding statement or section that

A concluding statement or section

Properly establishes and maintains a

Adequately establishes and

Minimally establishes and maintains

Formal style is unclear or limited.

Would It Be Ethical To Colonize Mars?

Why is Pluto no longer a planet?

Why is Pluto no longer a planet?

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto

Many habitable environments

Looking for life

Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer

Is Moon Mining Economically Feasible?

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