What To Leave on the Moon--And What To Take Away

Today we revised our drafts of the two questions we have to answer in writing, describing the landscape we're building and talking about where we'll do our public display. The team hopes we can do a public event at Impression 5 Science Museum here in Lansing. They wrote:

Impression 5 is a hands on public science museum. We are going to try do our live performance there. A lot of people will be at Impression 5 so we want to do our demonstration there. It is local to the Lansing area. We all love impression 5, and they have classrooms that we can use. Plus lots of public and home schoolers will be there and we could publicize the event on Facebook and our blog to reach people who would be interested in seeing our robot and trying it out.

We spent some time talking about the moon: how it was made, what it's made of, how it influences the tides. We talked about the confirmation a few years ago that there is water ice on the moon, in places that are constantly in darkness. Solar radiation makes water on the surface disperse into space through a process called photodissolution. None of us knew that before; now we do. We noticed the word is made up of "photo," which means like, and "dissolve," which means to dissipate.

We learned about why there are mare on the face of the moon we see, but hardly any on the other side (it has to do, the theory goes, with the concentration of heat-producing elements). We went through that just to make sure the team was up-to-date on basic moon facts and background, and interesting current questions like whether there is enough water on the moon to support lunar colonization.

My work for the day is pretty much done. After the afternoon snack break, I just have to make sure they know how to use the video camera, and talk with them a little about the content of their video, and then they can work on that. If they can get filming done today, we'll have time to edit tomorrow. That will be an adventure because I don't think any of us have done it before. The team has to choose one of four questions to talk about in their video. They chose, "When you go to the moon, what would you leave on the moon and why?" They have a lot of ideas about leaving behind a scientific robot.

If I were making my own movie, I'd choose, "What do you think should happen to the heritage artifacts already on the moon?" because I learned today in the course of our exploration that among those heritage artifacts are the astronauts' urine bags. I'd like to propose that we collect those and bring them back. My scientific rationale would be that we could study the urine for hints about the effects on the body of low gravity. But mostly I'm just amused by the thought of Pee Bags From The Moon. Here is what we wrote about the landscape we'd like to build. I typed this from their ideas and dictation.

We looked at a lot of pictures taken on the moon as we were thinking about how to do our landscape. We would like our lunar landscape to be realistic and rocky, with craters and even craters-in-craters. We saw a picture of a mountain range on the moon that gave us ideas for the plateau we have to include in our landscape for the challenge. There are large flat seas on the moon where molten rock flowed and cooled, and the main part of our landscape may be kind of like that so our robot can maneuver more easily. We plan to make a backdrop for our landscape that will show the earth in the moon's sky. 

We like to build with Legos and hope to use them for some of the features of our landscape. We are only wondering if we can find enough gray bricks! But Mitchal also knows how to make a mix of sand, glue, and water, that can be poured and molded. We think this mix could make a very real-looking moon surface and will probably incorporate it into our design as well. Although we are planning to use treads on our robot, and think that will help with traction, we also think the sand mix will make a nice surface for our robot to drive on.