Fake Moon Dirt Is in Demand Again

March 16, 2005
The Man Who Made Moon Dirt for NASA Is in Demand Again
Bush's Exploration Plans Have Created a Need For Dr. Carter's Expertise
By AMY SCHATZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

HOUSTON -- President Bush wants to go back to the moon, but Houston has
a problem: an acute shortage of fake moon dirt.

The White House kicked off a new space race last year when it announced
plans for U.S. astronauts to return to the moon for long visits by 2020
in preparation for manned missions to Mars. In his latest budget,
President Bush again increased the exploration budget for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration.

That means NASA now has the funds to design all sorts of new
technologies to help sustain human life in space, from new,
dust-resistant spacesuits to machinery that can extract water from
beneath the moon's surface.

But to do all that, the agency will need lots of sooty gray fake moon
dirt for experiments -- more than 100 tons of it. Unfortunately, NASA
gave most of its old supply away years ago. The dirt it now has on hand
fits neatly in a five-gallon paint bucket from Home Depot.

To meet the new needs, NASA is counting on help from a 67-year-old
Texas professor who has become an expert in the unlikely art of making
moon dirt -- and is possessive about his secret technique.

"It's very important you get it right. A lot of people's research is
depending on you giving them a good [dirt]," says James L. Carter, a
geoscience professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The lanky white-bearded geologist didn't set out to become one of the
world's leading experts on fake moon dirt, called "lunar regolith
simulant." Indeed, he's more widely known for helping discover the
remains of an alamosaurus, a dinosaur believed to have weighed as much
as four African elephants, in Texas' Big Bend National Park a decade
ago.

But early in his career, Dr. Carter helped uncover the chemical makeup
of the actual lunar soil brought back by the Apollo astronauts from
1969 to 1972.

Lunar soil is nothing like the dirt found on Earth. The gritty
talcum-powder-like soil is made up largely of glass, which forms when
tiny meteorites hit the moon's surface and melt its mineral-rich soil.

While preparing for the Apollo missions, NASA had created 34 types of
fake moon dirt to simulate various conditions that telescope pictures
led them to anticipate. They also had looked at meteorites they thought
were similar to moon rocks. But nothing prepared astronauts on the moon
for the clinging dust that clogged into spacesuit crevices and
scratched equipment when it was wiped off.

To address such problems, NASA set aside about $75,000 for creation of
a dusty moon dirt in 1991. Dr. Carter offered to try making it. Two
years later, at a mill outside Phoenix, he spent a month grinding and
sifting volcanic ash to produce about 25 tons of the black dirt, at a
cost of about $1.50 a pound.

The dirt, dubbed JSC-1 (for the Johnson Space Center), was packed in
50-pound bags and sent out free to researchers and universities.

The secret of JSC-1 is in how the volcanic ash is ground so its
minerals and glass closely resemble the same chemical mix and grain
size of the real thing.

Making moon dirt isn't as easy as it sounds, Dr. Carter insists. It
requires more than just grinding up a few tons of materials and "is
actually a very difficult thing to do." But he refuses to reveal how he
did it, citing intellectual-property rights; he is thinking about
trying to patent his process. Still, he says, he isn't in it for the
money. "To me, it's an intellectual challenge more than anything else.
I really enjoy this."

It's possible to come up with various recipes for moon dirt, says
Ronald Schlagheck, manager of NASA's materials program at the Marshall
Space Flight Center. Indeed, NASA is working on a new generation of
moon dirts. But, Mr. Schlagheck says, "we don't want to get in a
situation with dozens of customers and dozens of recipes."

Dr. Carter says he is more than willing to spend his summer this year
grinding another batch for NASA and the agency is inclined to take Dr.
Carter up on his offer.

Until recently, interest in lunar research within the agency was so
slight that officials hadn't contemplated making any more synthetic
moon dirt.

While most of NASA's 842 pounds of genuine lunar rock and dirt sits
behind bank-vault-like security in a second-floor clean room at the
Johnson Space Center, plastic bags of the fake stuff were stuffed in
$3.50 paint buckets and housed in an educational-outreach office.

Much of NASA's fake moon dirt was sent to schools for use in
science-fair projects or it was handed out in baggies to dignitaries
visiting the Houston space center. By 2003, with NASA down to its last
bag, it even stopped sending out 100-gram samples of the dirt to
students.

"There was no money to get more. At that time, the interest [in the
moon] seemed to have died down," says David McKay, chief scientist of
astrobiology at the space center.

Now, with supplies virtually gone, Carlton Allen, NASA's astromaterials
curator, has had to turn down at least 20 requests from contractors in
the past year. Caterpillar Inc. alone estimates it will need two to
four tons of fake moon soil for a $4 million project to develop heavy
machinery to move lunar soil.

NASA's likely deal with Dr. Carter would be a stopgap solution, as it
hopes to stockpile tons of dirt using two or three better moon-dirt
recipes, perhaps from other makers as well, that would simulate dirt
found on different parts of the moon. Those soils could then be
customized for specific experiments.

One promising area for an ingredient for the next generation of moon
dirt is in the Stillwater Complex mining region in Montana's Beartooth
Mountains. Geologists are also investigating several volcanic areas in
Hawaii, which provided rock for tons of orange-hued fake Mars dirt that
NASA used to test its two successful Exploration Rovers.

MrPepper11 wrote:


To meet the new needs, NASA is counting on help from a 67-year-old
Texas professor who has become an expert in the unlikely art of
making
moon dirt -- and is possessive about his secret technique.

"It's very important you get it right. A lot of people's research is
depending on you giving them a good [dirt]," says James L. Carter, a
geoscience professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.


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Rusty