Forty-year-old scoop helps future NASA exploration of Moon

William Atkins
Saturday, 21 June 2008 23:15

Science - Space

A scoop on Surveyor 3, which landed on the Moon in 1967 and retrieved by Apollo 12 astronauts in 1969, is being used to help determine the best way for astronauts to dig in the lunar soil as NASA prepares to go back to the Moon.

U.S. astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, while on their Apollo 12 mission, landed their lunar module (LM-6) “Intrepid” about 200 yards away from the NASA robotic spacecraft Surveyor 3. At the time, NASA scientists wanted to learn how the materials on the little probe had held up while on its mission in the harsh environment of the Moon.

Surveyor 3 landed on the Moon on April 20, 1967. It landed at the Mare Cognitium portion of the Oceanus Procellarum.

During thieir second excursion on the lunar surface, the two moon walkers removed numerous pieces of the Surveyor 3 so they could be analyzed by scientists back on Earth. One large object was the scoop on the end of Surveyer 3’s extendable, robotic arm.

The scoop had dug into the lunar surface in order to analyze the composition of the lunar soil, what is called "regolith" by lunar scientists.

To make a long story short, scientists at the Johnson Space Center, after finished with studying the scoop, gave it to Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (Hutchinson, Kansas).

Now, in 2008, scientists with the In-Situ Resource Utilization Regolith Characterization (ISRU) group at NASA's Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, borrowed it from the Kansas space museum so they could measure it. They want to find out the best type of scoop to use for upcoming missions to the Moon.

NASA is returning to the moon with its new Constellation project.

The trouble with the scoop is it can't be taken out of its container. Please read on.