Colonizing the Moon?
Darby Dyar, professor of astronomy and geology at Mount Holyoke College, says the moon is to people today what the New World was to Europeans 600 years ago. “They had been there a few times,” said Dyar, “but it took time to work up the courage to send people there to stay.”
It’s no fantasy. Scientists like Dyar have been working on the prospect of colonizing the moon for decades. “In my lifetime,” she said, “we will establish some kind of permanent station on the moon. Mind you, I plan to live another 50 years!”
Now Dyar is serving on the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. The “virtual” part refers to the fact that the monthly meetings and collaboration between team members takes place mostly through video-conferencing.
The project involves nine teams around the country, of which Dyar serves on three. She will be studying minerals on the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids.
Among her tasks: Figure out how future residents on the moon can get at that chemical compound that is essential to human existence – water. No water, no life.
“The moon is a very dry place,” said Dyar. “That’s why it’s difficult to imagine living on it.”
The challenge is to find out where the water is and how to tap it, said Dyar. “We have to understand how water got to the moon, how much is still there, and how hard it would be to extract water for human consumption for a settlement,” she said.
Some water was formed at the same time as the moon was formed, she said, and is “locked” in its minerals in tiny amounts. It’s a concept that’s hard to understand for people who are used to water flowing freely.
Water would also come from comets that have crashed on the moon. Comets are made of ice, said Dyar, and the heat of the impact melts the ice. Some of the water is preserved in “permanently shadowed craters” where the sun cannot reach it.
