At a recent meeting held in Edinburgh, Scotland to consider ”Forming and Exploring Habitable Worlds,” Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College (UK) made a case for an ambitious project that may, at first glance, seem outside the purview of planetary science. We need, Crawford says, a human base on the Moon. Not only would such an outpost provide research infrastructure comparable to what we have in Antarctica, it would be a sensible intermediary step for extending human activities to Mars.
One major focus of a lab on the Moon would be to study lunar geology and to take inventory of whatever resources the Moon may offer. The most valuable of these might be helium-3, which could serve as a future fuel for (relatively) safe nuclear fusion energy, since it is not radioactive itself and doesn’t cause the material around it to become radioactive. Helium-3 has been implanted by the solar wind into the lunar soil over billions of years, and even recently has been returned to Earth in a lunar mineral sample collected by the Chinese Chang’e 5 mission.
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