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Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
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6

Summary

In an hour-long final session on the workshop’s second day, the moderators of each of the workshop’s previous three sessions reported what they had taken from the presentations, thus providing a comprehensive, session-by-session summary of the workshop’s contents.

CLPS PLANS AND OPPORTUNITIES

The summaries began with Mohammad Kassemi and James Pawelczyk reporting on the session devoted to Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program plans and opportunities. Kassemi started out by saying that he and Pawelczyk would be both summarizing what was said in the session and giving their own impressions of the session.

Beginning with the CLPS overview provided by Jay Jenkins and Julie Schonfeld, Kassemi repeated Jenkins’s description of CLPS: “CLPS is an innovative, service-based, competitive acquisition approach that enables rapid, affordable, and frequent access to the lunar surface via a growing market of American commercial providers.” The Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program is not part of CLPS, but it is one of the ways that principal investigator (PI)-led proposals are selected to be funded for the CLPS program. There are other ways as well.

All NASA-sponsored payloads, including PRISM awardees, are manifested by a CLPS Manifest Selection Board, which has representation from multiple NASA directorates. Because the selection of a particular vendor to carry a set of payloads to the Moon is made via a competitive bidding process, PIs looking to use the CLPS program are strongly encouraged not to tailor their payload to any particular vendor. The payload should be “provider agnostic.” CLPS task orders are a firm fixed price, so all payload-sourced requirements must be known and documented prior to a CLPS request for a task order proposals release.

CLPS payload integration is defined by the external provider, but CLPS provides a payload integration manager and a project scientist to guide investigators through the integration process and to maximize the science. PIs with a CLPS payload will have the opportunity to define their requirements up front to achieve their science objectives and will be responsible for delivering models, analyses, interface test units, flight hardware, and associated data packages to the vendor over the course of design, development, test, and integration.

CLPS vendors are responsible for providing the necessary interactions and services for lunar launch, delivery, and operations to carry out the PI’s experiment.

Kassemi followed that overview with his and Pawelczyk’s general impressions of what they heard. First, he said, CLPS is a program that is very innovative and holds great promise, but it is nascent and complex. Its success is not guaranteed. NASA will select payloads that are optimized for the overall science return. The hardware provided by NASA is not fully determined ahead of time, and the cost to PIs of developing their own hardware might discourage some potential investigators from participating in the process. CLPS is not “one size fits all.”

Continuing, Kassemi observed that the CLPS program shifts payload integration responsibilities to the launch service providers, and expectations from the different providers may vary, so PIs should be

Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×

aware of that. The CLPS payloads are customer-owned, with a transfer of custody but not ownership to the provider; the system is analogous to having FedEx or UPS carry and deliver packages. CLPS deliveries are CLPS provider missions—they are not NASA missions—so PIs could work directly with CLPS providers without going through NASA.

From there, Pawelczyk took over, beginning with key points from the presentation from Masten Space Systems. He noted that, first, a whole new way of thinking is required from PIs—in a good way—and PIs need to change in order to capitalize on this opportunity.

There were three basic lessons for researchers interested in lunar science studies: First, speed is your ally. Use this mechanism to iterate experiments quickly. Set yourself up to adapt to an opportunity.

Second, risk is your friend. Trying to reduce risk to the point where it is negligible will only result in losing out on opportunities. Having said that, Pawelczyk added, “you don’t want to fly in a frivolous way,” taking unnecessary risks. Earth-based risk reduction with a ground-based analog can increase the chances of success for a lunar experiment.

Third, testing is truth. Test, test, and test some more. You should be tweaking your designs, Pawelczyk continued, in response to what the testing tells you, and modeling can only go so far.

Turning to impressions from the Masten presentation, Pawelczyk pointed to the lesson that there is a trade-off between speed and complexity/ambition, and that choosing speed over ambition provides more opportunities to iterate and improve payloads. He said the goal should be “using speed as an opportunity here and accepting perhaps a little bit more risk along the way, but with a more robust around testing program that includes short hops.” PIs who use the CLPS program will have a greater opportunity to innovate, but also a greater responsibility for hardware validation.

Turning to Jason Hatton’s presentation on the European Space Agency (ESA), Pawelczyk commented that it seems clear that there is a close alignment between the scientific interests of NASA and ESA. Furthermore, various opportunities for cooperation between the two agencies exist. ESA may take advantage of the commercial deliveries available through CLPS, for instance. ESA’s European Large Logistics Lander, which is under development, could be of interest to NASA. ESA, in turn, might be able to take advantage of NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon. The two agencies are now discussing a number of opportunities for collaboration.

Hatton also spoke about some of the limitations of today’s lunar landers, Pawelczyk noted. For instance, the problem of maintaining power and thermal control through a lunar night has still not been solved. Similarly, landers have difficulty providing controlled environments for a long enough duration for certain types of experiments. Today’s landers are not able to return to Earth with samples gathered or created on the lunar surface.

Speaking about the impressions that he and Kassemi took away from Hatton’s talk, Pawelczyk said that although NASA and ESA have a close alignment in their scientific interests and many opportunities for cooperation, U.S. PIs are generally not familiar with ESA’s lunar science plans and opportunities. Getting U.S. PIs involved in the European space efforts will probably require international partner agreements.

Pawelczyk concluded with his and Kassemi’s overall impressions from the session’s presentations. First, he said, “There are a lot of great opportunities for growth and development here, and we should be thinking about how best to take advantage of them.” However, he continued, it is a complex landscape for those people who are not familiar with working on space research. There are a number of possible ways to help these people with the process, from workforce development through workshops. Additionally, there may be computer-based training to post-award assistance, such as payload integration scientists or payload managers who could help shepherd PIs through the process, or perhaps the CLPS Manifest Selection Board could play some role there.

Another impression is that there may be a gap in validating the experimental performance of PI-supplied hardware. Although some researchers are at large universities with spaceflight instrumentation laboratories, many do not have that luxury. There may be a need to find ways to help those scientists, Pawelczyk noted.

Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×

To ensure the success of payload development, delivery, and operation on the lunar surface, Pawelczyk said, it will be important to have an entity that is responsible for overseeing the entire process. In particular, a mechanism is needed to ensure stronger collaboration between the home universities of PIs and commercial space entities.

Last, he said, there is a question as to whether the PIs should be talking with any of the vendors at the proposal stage in order to improve the quality of their proposal. Researchers working with the CLPS program have no guarantee which launch provider they will be using, he noted, “but if you’re working early with the launch provider, you’re going to develop a great relationship, probably have an opportunity to refine your payload.” Unfortunately, if some other CLPS provider ends up with that payload, it will hurt the team and hurt the science, Pawelczyk said. “So do you just stay with that CLPS provider and avoid the NASA mechanism?” That, he said, is an issue that will need to be sorted out as this program continues to evolve.

LIFE SCIENCES RESEARCH ON THE LUNAR SURFACE

Krystyn Van Vliet summarized the presentations on life science research on the lunar surface. She and her co-moderator, Jana Stoudemire, had used three framing questions in their review of the presentations, she said: First, what is the research that is actually worth doing on the way to the Moon and on the lunar surface? Second, how can the space environment best be used as a laboratory to generate knowledge and to enable future exploration of the Moon as well as Mars and beyond? And third, what are the biggest barriers and opportunities for life sciences research on the lunar surface?

Regarding what research is worth doing, Van Vliet said that a number of areas had emerged in the talks. The first was the study of the microbiome both of humans and of space environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS) or a lunar habitat. The second was the use of plant systems and microbes for maintaining a sustainable presence on the Moon and elsewhere off Earth. Third was the study of the effects of space environments on various organisms in order to gain insight into how those environments will affect humans; specific topics of interest include the effects of radiation and low gravity. The fourth was the use of microfluidic chip systems, or “organs on a chip,” to understand the effects of space environments on human health as well as to study the lunar production of diagnostics or medicines. The fifth was the study of plant and organism biosphere ecosystem models that demonstrate the ability to support life.

The rationale for prioritizing this kind of research, Van Vliet said, is that it is important to make sure that the research questions being studied on the lunar surface should be well framed. The importance—the “So what?”—of this research should be well understood and articulated.

On the general subject of how best to use space and the lunar environment as a laboratory, Van Vliet identified a half dozen themes that she and Stoudemire had heard: One was the importance of using multiple platforms—on the ground, in sub-orbital flight, on the ISS, and on or orbiting the Moon. It will also be important, she said, to develop leading-edge capabilities, both on the ground and on the surface of the Moon. Such capabilities would appear both in robust automated hardware systems and human-tended platforms. Lunar researchers need to be able to carry out iterative, repeated, and reproducible experiments targeting focused questions. Just doing one experiment is not considered “good enough” for a laboratory on Earth. It should not be considered good enough for a laboratory on the lunar surface or in transit, she said.

Organizationally, it will be desirable to have an established, regular mode of exchange—of personnel, ideas, platforms, and data—among NASA, academia, and industry, Van Vliet said. She continued by noting that there should also be continued collaborations with other U.S. government agencies and international agencies. Last, having access to the Moon beyond NASA—that is, CLPS—is an important way of accelerating research. For example, Van Vliet pointed to Charles Cockell’s observation that while a standard experimental cycle carried out in space might stretch to 10 years, he was able to have 1-year research cycles using commercial space services. “This will be important to accelerating the answer to

Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×

key life sciences questions and exploration,” Van Vliet said, “but it’s also very important to sustaining a diverse research community in the U.S. and globally.”

Last, Van Vliet described a number of broad answers to the third framing question, about the major barriers and opportunities to lunar science. She offered those answers as paired barriers and opportunities. One major barrier, for example, is the set of challenging environmental conditions on the lunar surface in which experiments must function. In meeting that challenge, there is an opportunity to use scalable automated and human-tended platforms that can withstand these conditions. Another barrier is data sets that are small or difficult to compare; there is an opportunity to create usable data sets that can be combined. Currently, even when data are available, there is often a limited understanding of the mechanistic effects involved in various phenomena of interest. In developing an understanding of mechanistic effects, there are opportunities to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning to bear on the problems and, in doing so, to collaborate with those who have expertise in these areas. Limits on communicating data, including “big data,” relevant to lunar experiments pose a challenge. The flip side of that is that there is an opportunity to develop capabilities that accelerate the transmission of scientific data. Last, the long time frame necessary to complete experiments continues to be a barrier, and accelerating research through increased access to the lunar environment via CLPS and other approaches is an opportunity. The rationale behind the last point, Van Vliet said, is that it is a long and costly journey to the Moon, so it is very important to do it right.

PHYSICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH ON THE LUNAR SURFACE

Next, Steve Collicott and Douglas Matson offered a review of the session devoted to physical sciences research on the lunar surface. Collicott began the review by offering a list of four themes that he and Matson had identified in the presentations on physical sciences research. The first, he said, was that the lunar surface is essential; there are certain experiments that cannot be carried out effectively elsewhere. For example, a number of science and technology topics study or use lunar regolith—the layer of rocky material that covers the Moon—and one cannot get definitive answers to the relevant questions either by modeling the regolith or by doing experiments in 1 g. In the area of granular materials, Collicott said, there is a strong case for doing research in one-sixth g as part of the overall effort to learn to connect microscale structures to macroscopic properties and behaviors. In studying fire safety, which involves chemical reactions, heat transfer, convection, and gravity, it seems that the behavior of flames is particularly difficult to predict at around one-sixth g. In general, he said, it is important to move beyond models and analogs and be able to gather actual correlated data, which for phenomena under lunar gravity can only be collected on the Moon.

A second theme was that frequent access to the lunar surface is important for advancing transformative science and developing disruptive technologies. One reason is the importance of iteration—of repeating experiments in order to improve experimental designs, equipment, and understanding. Jack Burns’s talk on radio astronomy illustrated this well, Collicott said. In the context of frequent access to the lunar surface, he said, one important lesson from the presentations was “Don’t be afraid to reach too far; take on risk to be transformative.” Furthermore, frequent access to the lunar surface helps in growing expert scientists and the next generation of researchers.

Another theme was the complexity of the lunar environment. The gravity is one-sixth that of Earth, there are strong radiation and large temperature swings on the surface, electrostatically charged dust can cover almost anything, and micrometeorites are regularly coming in. All these things make designing and carrying out experiments challenging.

The experiments most likely to succeed on the Moon have certain attributes, Collicott said. They will be miniaturized, of short duration, enclosed, shielded, thermally controlled, and simple in operation and will produce relatively low-bandwidth streams of data for transmission back to Earth.

With that, Matson took over the summary and turned to some of the concerns about physical science research on the lunar surface that had been discussed during the session. First, using CLPS to do a

Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×

scientific experiment requires a totally different approach from what researchers are used to and from what NASA is used to. In particular, scientists have to worry about the details of the vehicle that will get their experiment to the Moon, designing their experiment with the vehicle in mind, and this has generally not been an issue in the past.

Second, Matson said, it is not completely clear where the border is between lunar surface science and lunar surface technology. Is, for instance, the work on making cement on the Moon’s surface science, or is it technology? Knowing the border between these two areas will be important for a number of reasons, including knowing where to send research proposals.

There are also huge learning curve issues, he said. For example, only so much can be automated, so astronaut time will be a critical resource for monitoring, option selection, and human-tended active control. However, it will be very difficult to have such active control of a system on the lunar surface, while, on the other hand, astronauts may be available during the transit from Earth to the Moon. It will take some time to determine the best way to allocate astronaut time versus automating what can be automated. Learning will also be involved with deciding which projects should go on a CLPS lander, Matson said. Only so much can be miniaturized. Self-contained, packaged experiments will be a good starting point, but eventually astronauts will need to go outside the bubble and do work in the external environment. Because learning is evolutionary, having access will be a key. Last, repeatability will be crucial to learning, he said, so “we have to have a higher emphasis on duplication of experiments.”

The last concern he mentioned is having power for doing all the various physical science experiments. “There’s always a power issue here,” he said, “and that really hasn’t been addressed, and it could be the topic of an entire workshop.”

PARTING COMMENTS

Robert Ferl, Co-Chair of the Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space, thanked the moderators for their summaries and notes. “There are some very clear and consistent messages that are, I would say as an observer, fairly typical for our endeavors over the past years,” he said. Ferl specifically pointed to the messages regarding crew time and power. He then noted, “Perhaps mostly in the biological sciences. The idea of repetition.” The message of replicating flights should be heard “deeper and more intrinsically” than in the past.

Dava Newman, Co-Chair of the Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space, also thanked the NASA presenters who gave context for the workshop. “I’m incredibly inspired. I really have a lot of optimism,” Newman stated. She spoke to the rich discussion and the ideas. “From the microbes to the cells, to the plants, to all the physical phenomena to the gravity and the environment.” The number of experiments exceed the ability to fund or fly all of them. “That was the intent,” said Newman. This workshop was just the beginning. “Now everyone has license to dream,” she said.

Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×
Page 30
Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×
Page 31
Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×
Page 32
Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×
Page 33
Suggested Citation:"6 Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26378.
×
Page 34
Next: Appendixes »
Report Series: Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space: Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives: Proceedings of a Workshop Get This Book
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After several decades since the last human visit, NASA is planning to return to the Moon, this time not only to visit but also to carry out extensive scientific experiments, establish a habitat occupied by astronauts, and learn lessons that will help in preparations for the eventual establishment of a human presence on Mars. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, overseen by NASA, will provide transport to the Moon for scientists who want to carry out research on the lunar surface or in orbit around the Moon.

Recognizing the need to introduce and explain the CLPS program to researchers, the Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop on March 24-25, 2021 entitled "Using Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to Achieve Lunar Biological and Physical Science Objectives". The organization of the workshop was guided by the following question: Looking at the period of time prior to the release of the next decadal survey, how can this community support and utilize CLPS to address areas of research? This workshop proceedings summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop sessions.</>

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