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NASA wants to land Artemis astronauts on the moon in 2027, but the scientific instruments they’ll bring must be tested on Earth. The best place to do that is a mile-wide meteorite crater in Arizona.
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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
NASA wants to land astronauts in its Artemis program on the moon next year. But first, the scientific instruments those astronauts will bring along have to be tested on Earth. The best place to do that is in a giant crater in the Arizona desert. Melissa Sevigny of member station KNAU takes us there.
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MELISSA SEVIGNY, BYLINE: The desert rises to what seems like an ordinary hill until you hike to the top and see a massive hole blasted into the ground. Two Canadian geologists, Sharini Kanni Suresh Babu and Ashka Thaker, stand at the crater’s edge.
SHARINI KANNI SURESH BABU: We are looking at a lot of white stones which are shocked Kaibab.
ASHKA THAKER: A formation, yes.
BABU: Yeah, yeah. We are on top of that right now. And the view here is great.
SEVIGNY: The stones are shocked because they got pummeled by an asteroid that screamed in 50,000 years ago. Plenty of asteroids have hit the earth, but the craters tend to get erased by wind and water. Thaker says Arizona’s Meteor Crater is the best preserved on the planet.
THAKER: And it looks strikingly similar to what we see on the moon, so that’s one of the reason why it makes it a really good study space.
SEVIGNY: Images of the moon are hard to interpret without actually being there, hence today’s fieldwork. It’s a test of a portable mapping instrument called lidar.
BABU: You just carry the lidar on your backpack and walk around.
THAKER: Right over there, two little ant people.
SEVIGNY: It takes a long while for the two little ants, Sashank Vanga and Catherine Neish, to make their way around the crater’s rim. Vanga carries the whirring 30-pound lidar on his back.
SASHANK VANGA: It shoots out a bunch of pulses of infrared light. And you can measure how long the light took to bounce off of the surroundings and return to the sensor.
SEVIGNY: The result is a three-dimensional map so detailed, it picks up fractures in the rocks, as long as you keep going at a steady clip, says Neish.
CATHERINE NEISH: It was exhausting (laughter). We couldn’t stop walking so we were going…
SEVIGNY: Scientists will use this map to help understand what they see in pictures of lunar craters. But they also want to know what’s underground. For that, they need a different instrument called a ground-penetrating radar.
KRISTIAN CHAN: It looks like a lawnmower, except it doesn’t cut grass.
SEVIGNY: Kristian Chan is part of a team from Johns Hopkins University. He pushes the gently beeping radar over rocks, shrubs and old cow pies.
CHAN: And we can kind of look what’s underneath without actually having to, like, dig down.
SEVIGNY: What’s underneath Meteor Crater is weirdly folded and smushed up rock. On the moon, the hope is to find ice. Wes Patterson leads the radar instrument team at Johns Hopkins.
WES PATTERSON: Looking for ice on the moon is crucial for human exploration and the future of human exploration. If it’s there, we don’t have to bring it.
SEVIGNY: Patterson says water ice probably hides in the everlasting shadows cast by lunar craters. But so far, scientists have only been able to skim the surface.
PATTERSON: Certainly, in our community, we’d love to get more spacecraft to the moon to help look deeper, or people or rovers or landers, you know, of course.
SEVIGNY: That’s the plan with the Artemis program. And it’s no coincidence that some of the preparations are happening in Arizona, where Apollo astronauts trained half a century ago. Catherine Neish again.
NEISH: You can understand – right? – like, why astronauts would train out here. It really does look like the moon. You know, if you put a gray scale filter on here, you could imagine yourself walking around the moon.
SEVIGNY: It’s part of Meteor Crater’s allure how easy it is to imagine an alien landscape and rehearse a visit to another world without ever leaving the earth.
For NPR News, I’m Melissa Sevigny in Flagstaff.
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