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00:01A future space station synchronized to planet Earth, the potential for life buried under miles of ice, and rogue moons
00:12that could wipe out life as we know it.
00:19We're all familiar with the moon that hangs in our night sky and controls the ebb and flow of life
00:25on our planet. But Earth's moon is only one of hundreds in the solar system, each of them a mysterious
00:32and often bizarre world. Could these alien moons offer a key to exploring outer space and perhaps to finding a
00:42new home for humanity?
00:45Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
01:03December 1972. Apollo 17, NASA's final voyage to the moon, completes its mission to collect moon rocks and perform gravity
01:13and seismic activity experiments.
01:16After spending 75 hours on the moon's surface and exploring more than 22 miles in the lunar rover, astronauts Jack
01:25Schmidt and Eugene Cernan prepare for their journey home.
01:29As Commander Cernan approaches the lunar module, he readies himself to take the last human steps on the moon.
01:39This is Gene, and as I take man's last step from the surface, and as we leave the moon, we
01:47leave as we came, and God willing as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the
01:58crew of Apollo 17.
02:01In just over a decade, NASA's Apollo program had successfully developed and executed a space exploration mission that allowed 12
02:10people to walk on Earth's moon.
02:14But how much do we really know about the giant gray sphere that hangs in our sky?
02:22What precisely is the moon? And just what makes it different from our planet or other planets in the universe?
02:32A planet is a large object that's going independently around a star. And so what a moon is, is an
02:40object that is not going directly around a star, but around a planet, as the planet itself goes around the
02:47star.
02:49So the Earth, for example, has a very large moon. Many of the planets in our solar system have moons.
02:56Every one of these objects are little worlds of their own.
03:01A lot of people think of moons as like our moon. It's kind of black and white, cold, dead, geologically
03:11inactive. But it's relatively boring compared to what we know of some other moons.
03:19For example, Pan looks like a flying saucer or a ravioli. Hyperion looks like a sea sponge with all of
03:29these strange pits in its surface.
03:33And then we look at Jupiter's moon Io, which is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, covered
03:41with yellows and oranges.
03:46We know of something like 300 moons in the solar system today, and we are always discovering more.
03:52Each of these objects has a unique and distinctive geology. It's a different color. It has a different history.
04:00Each one is kind of a puzzle piece in understanding the solar system.
04:06You could say that many of the bizarre moons that circle our neighboring planets make the Earth's moon seem rather
04:13dull.
04:14But a closer look reveals that our gray companion is the perfect partner for creating a thriving environment on our
04:23planet.
04:24The size, proximity, and singularity of our moon make our home world quite unique.
04:33Earth is the only terrestrial planet in the solar system that has a major moon.
04:39Mercury and Venus don't have moons.
04:42Mars has some little captured moons.
04:46We are unique in that we are a terrestrial planet that has this moon that is huge.
04:52The moon is very unusual in that it's about one-quarter the size of the Earth in terms of diameter.
04:59It's very big compared to planet Earth.
05:03Our moon is humongous, even the largest moons of our solar system.
05:08We look at Ganymede and Titan, large worlds of Jupiter and Saturn.
05:14They're nothing in comparison to the size of those giant planets.
05:20And then we look at the moon, and it is huge compared to the Earth.
05:26It turns out that this solitary, large moon has helped make our planet the livable world that it is.
05:34The moon's motion around the Earth is so regular that cultures have created calendars, in many cases reliant on the
05:45cycles of the moon.
05:46It's a timepiece in terms of when is a good time to grow a crop, to plant, to harvest.
05:54The other thing is that the moon has a physical influence on the Earth.
05:59If we didn't have a large moon that we have, we would have much more wobble of our spin axis,
06:06which would lead to more extreme seasons.
06:09We also wouldn't have tides, so that has implications for the development of life on Earth.
06:18Life wouldn't have been able to develop from the seas to the land so easily if we didn't have a
06:26moon.
06:27We are very lucky that we have our moon here to stabilize our spin, to stabilize the tilt of our
06:33planet on its axis,
06:34and stabilize its own rotation around the sun.
06:39And the moon is one of the things that keeps us safe from the gravitational bullying of Jupiter or other
06:47planets.
06:48It safeguards the climate of Earth through this action.
06:53We're very lucky to have a large moon stabilizing us.
06:57While the moon plays an instrumental role in the balance of life on Earth, this may not have always been
07:03the case.
07:05Because there is evidence that our moon may have once had a twin.
07:14Santa Cruz, California, August 3rd, 2011.
07:18At the University of California, Santa Cruz, planetary scientist Eric Asfod publishes a study theorizing that the Earth once had
07:28not one, but two moons.
07:32Our planet having a single moon seems like an eternal constant ever since humans first looked up at the sky.
07:39But could this incredible theory about a second moon actually be true?
07:46As familiar as the moon is, one of the lingering big mysteries about the moon is how did it form?
07:54Where does it come from?
07:55The prevailing theory is that the moon formed when actually a larger object, larger than the moon,
08:03hit the Earth very early in the Earth's history.
08:07This is known as the giant impact theory.
08:11The modern understanding of how our moon formed is that this giant impact sprayed out a bunch of debris that
08:18would later coalesce to form our moon.
08:20But there is a newer idea that says maybe, out of that debris, we form not one moon, but two.
08:30The idea of two moons orbiting around the Earth is fascinating.
08:34But if this theory is correct, where's the evidence?
08:38Whatever happened to our second moon?
08:42There is an intriguing idea called the big splat concept.
08:48The little sister moon trailing behind the major one, it kind of trailed after our moon in the same orbit,
08:55minding its own business.
08:55But slowly, since the moon was so much bigger, its gravity had taken over, and it would slowly pull this
09:05smaller moon in,
09:06and in slow motion basically smashed into the far side, and ends up creating many of the characteristics we see
09:15today,
09:16where our moon's two sides, one facing Earth and one facing away, are very geologically different.
09:25It's conceivable that the Earth had two moons in the past.
09:28It's conceivable it had multiple moons in the past.
09:32And we are at a stage when all of that evolution has finished,
09:38and having a single large moon is probably the most stable outcome.
09:43We take for granted that Earth has one giant moon.
09:47But we're actually very lucky that the Earth has a moon as big as we do.
09:52So this just goes to show how unique our moon is, almost like a twin planet system, the Earth and
09:59Moon.
10:00Which is lucky for us, because we rely on the environment that the moon helped create here on Earth.
10:09While the moon does an excellent job of making Earth habitable for humans,
10:14the lunar face we gaze at each night also hides a dark side.
10:21What can 21st century technology tell us about the hidden spaces and possible resources our moon may hold,
10:29that could change the course of space exploration as we know it.
10:42Wenzhang, China, May 3rd, 2024.
10:47In a historic mission, China launches the Chang'a-6 spacecraft from the island of Hainan.
10:55The purpose of this unmanned vessel is to bring back the first ever rock and soil samples from the far
11:02side of the moon.
11:03An area we cannot see from here on Earth.
11:07The lunar far side has been fascinating to people for a long time.
11:12Our first look was in 1959 from a Russian spacecraft that got some very fuzzy pictures at the back.
11:19Since then, of course, the flights of Apollo and other robotic missions, we've completely mapped both sides of the moon.
11:26But there's a lot of mystery around it because it faces away from us all the time.
11:31The moon is what we call tidally locked to the Earth.
11:35And what that means is that it's always facing the same side to the Earth.
11:41And so, of course, when you look up at the moon at the sky, you always see the same pattern
11:44on it.
11:45And that is because you're always looking at what we call the near side of the moon.
11:50And interestingly, the near side and the far side of the moon look very different from one another.
11:56One of the reasons the Apollo missions went to the near side of the moon first is because you can
11:59see it.
12:00And if you can see that side with your eyes, it means you can also see it with a radio
12:04antenna.
12:05It means we could talk.
12:06This is one of the reasons why we didn't send astronauts to the far side.
12:09There would be no way to communicate with them.
12:12So it can be very risky trying to go to the far side and just figuring out how do you
12:18get information to and from if it's always pointed away from the Earth.
12:26When Apollo 17 left, that was 1972.
12:30It was half a century ago and humans haven't been back since.
12:34And when you look at everything that humans were able to do during Apollo, that only amounts to about two
12:39weeks of total stay time.
12:41All in, only 12 people have ever walked on the moon.
12:45There's so much we have yet to explore.
12:47There are so many mysteries about the moon that are yet unanswered.
12:53While no human has touched the lunar surface in over 50 years, scientists are using new tools to explore the
13:00moon from its dark side to what lies below its rocky crust.
13:05Could there be resource steep underground that could make the moon a prime outpost for future space travel?
13:14Mountain View, California, January 11, 2018.
13:18At the SETI Institute, planetary scientist Pascal Lee and his team release a stunning discovery.
13:25Near the North Pole of the moon, Lee notices strange pits that he believes could be the entrance to giant
13:33underground caverns.
13:37I went on a manual search, so to speak, for caves near the moon's polar regions.
13:42I started with the North Pole, spiraled to lower latitudes.
13:47And sure enough, inside the Philolaus crater, we found a series of these little dots that looked like a string
13:56of collapsed lava tube roofs.
13:59It was a eureka moment because it was like a wish come true.
14:04We were seeing exactly what we were looking for.
14:09According to experts, several hundred such pits exist on the moon.
14:12And each one could be the entrance to massive underground caves where lava used to flow.
14:19But it's what we might find inside those caves that could change the course of space exploration.
14:26It's so important to explore a place like Philolaus or some of these other craters where we found caves
14:34because there are regions that are permanently shadowed.
14:37That's why they're so cold.
14:40And lava tubes and caves could be a place where ice would accumulate over time and be collected,
14:49and therefore be a place where you could harvest them.
14:53There's a lot at stake in finding water ice on the moon.
14:58Where you have water ice, you can make rocket fuel, you can make breathable oxygen, you can make drinkable water.
15:04But the big one really is rocket fuel.
15:07It's very, very expensive to launch fuel off Earth.
15:12And you have to burn fuel to carry fuel off our planet.
15:17It's much easier once you've extracted these fuels from the water that's there in the form of ice on the
15:24moon.
15:25And now the solar system is your backyard.
15:29Perhaps even more intriguing is that lava tubes and caves may also provide humans a place to live.
15:36The surface of the moon is extremely harsh.
15:40You are subject to ionizing radiation from deep space.
15:45You go underground.
15:46It's an entirely different realm.
15:49You are now shielded from space radiation.
15:53I'm also curious to see what else they might offer.
15:56There are other possible resources that could be found.
16:00Minerals.
16:02Who knows what the underground world will reveal to us.
16:06It's exciting to think that our single moon could hold resources that could take us farther into space.
16:13But there are planets in our solar system that have dozens of moons.
16:18And scientists have good reason to believe that some of them may harbor the building blocks of life.
16:32May 2023.
16:34A team of international astronomers announces a stunning discovery.
16:39They've located a whopping 62 new moons around the ringed planet of Saturn.
16:46This new discovery raises Saturn's count to a remarkable 145 moons.
16:52Well ahead of Jupiter and its 95 moons.
16:56Together, these two giants possess most of the moons in the solar system.
17:03In terms of the number of moons in the solar system,
17:06the vast majority of them are small objects that are orbiting either Jupiter or Saturn.
17:11And that's simply because the gravity of those planets is so high.
17:15Jupiter and Saturn are the largest planets in the solar system,
17:18and so they have the easiest time capturing small objects that are flying through the solar system.
17:25In the grip of Jupiter and Saturn's orbits are giant moons covered completely in ice.
17:30These include Ganyme, the largest known moon,
17:34and Callisto, which is as large as the planet Mercury.
17:39But what's really intriguing about these icy moons is that scientists believe some of them could harbor life.
17:51March 8th, 2024.
17:54NASA reveals that its upcoming mission to Jupiter's icy moon of Europa, the Europa Clipper Orbiter,
18:00will carry a one millimeter thick metal plate engraved with various messages about water.
18:07Why water?
18:10Because experts believe Europa contains a vast ocean up to a hundred miles deep under a layer of ice that
18:19is 15 miles thick.
18:22Underneath the ice, there is a liquid water ocean for Europa,
18:30larger in volume than the size of the Earth's ocean.
18:34This is amazing!
18:37Who would have thought that there could be another ocean in our solar system,
18:42bigger than our own ocean, orbiting around Jupiter?
18:48The spacecraft, in addition to its scientific payloads, actually has a plate that contains a bunch of engravings,
18:55much like Voyager and Pioneer had plaques that were designed to maybe communicate to the rest of the universe,
19:02things that the scientific team thought might be important to send out into the solar system.
19:07One of those is the picture of the sound waves of people saying the word water in more than a
19:14hundred languages.
19:16Another is a scientific diagram of what water is and how it absorbs light.
19:22The search for water is what connects us and this mission to the rest of our solar system.
19:29All life as we know it needs water.
19:33So the search for life in our solar system or beyond becomes the quest to find liquid water.
19:42And the indication that there's a subsurface ocean inside Europa,
19:49it gave us this potential location for life to have formed.
19:54We're hopeful for bacterial life.
19:58We're looking for the basics.
20:01We think there's a very good chance that there's going to be life there.
20:05There could be anything from the earliest microbes to whales living in there, we just don't know.
20:10But we may find out in the next decade or two.
20:13While discovering water on Europa is intriguing.
20:17Could there be a place in our solar system where a liquid other than water might produce life?
20:26December 25th, 2004.
20:30The Cassini spacecraft launches the Huygens probe towards Titan,
20:34Saturn's largest moon and the only moon in the solar system that has a significant atmosphere.
20:41Three weeks later, as the probe descends, its video camera captures what is truly another world.
20:51The video is spectacular.
20:55It's like you're parachuting down on Earth.
21:01Because you're coming through the clouds.
21:03You can see the haze layers part.
21:08And as the Huygens lander is getting closer to the ground, we start to be able to make out these
21:14river systems and lakes.
21:17And the view that we get from the surface is extremely Earth-like.
21:22It's pebbles and rocks.
21:25Except these aren't made of rock, they're made of ice.
21:29While the Huygens probe reveals a surprisingly Earth-like surface,
21:34covered with mountains of ice, there's one feature that is not of this Earth.
21:40Large pools of liquid methane on Titan's surface.
21:45On Earth, methane is an abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
21:49But on Titan, could it be a source of life?
21:54The observation of methane lakes and river systems on Titan has some people thinking,
22:03we use water on Earth for our life, life as we know it.
22:08Is it possible to have a life that is based off a different liquid?
22:14So, liquid methane.
22:15The surface of Titan is a really dynamic place.
22:19And there's a lot of questions about what's going on down there.
22:24Could there be alien life forms in the methane lakes of Titan?
22:28It seems fantastical.
22:30But early observation of these lakes revealed something extraordinary.
22:36One of the mysteries when we first landed on Titan's surface is that when we took repeated radar images of
22:45the same lakes on Titan,
22:47there were these features in the lakes that changed over time and kind of came and went.
22:52And they're called these magic islands.
22:56Scientists started calling them informally magic islands that would appear and disappear at will.
23:00The most recent research makes it look like those islands aren't islands at all.
23:05But instead, there's nitrogen and ethane and methane bubbling up from the interior.
23:11It really makes you wonder, having material bubbling up,
23:16well that only invites the question, what's actually going on down there?
23:21Could these strange bubbles come from some undiscovered form of life?
23:25Well, the only way to know may be to dive deep into Titan's lakes.
23:32Its largest lakes are just incredible in scale.
23:37Kraken Mare, which is the largest body of liquid on Titan, is enormous.
23:41It's twice the size of all the Great Lakes put together.
23:45But we haven't really explored below the surfaces of them.
23:49It really begs for exploration.
23:52We could build a submarine that we could put into one of these lakes on Titan,
23:56and have it go explore around the lake,
24:00maybe even looking for possible signs of life at the bottom of the lake.
24:07Finding life forms on far away moons covered in ice could change everything we thought we knew about our solar
24:13system.
24:14But on the other hand, moons could also wipe out every trace of life on the planet,
24:20when they become unstable and go rogue.
24:29Washington D.C., August 1877.
24:32At the U.S. Naval Observatory, using the largest refracting telescope in the world,
24:38a frustrated astronomer named Asaph Hall nearly abandons his search for the moons of Mars.
24:48Fortunately, his wife mathematician, Angeline Stickney, encourages Hall to persist.
24:55The moons of Mars were discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall.
25:00His wife really, in my view, deserves equal credit,
25:03because he actually had all but given up.
25:07And it's only at her insistence that in the end,
25:10he was able to discover moons around Mars by spotting little dots of light.
25:16Hall names the two moons Phobos and Deimos, meaning fear and terror,
25:20after the sons of the Greek god of war.
25:24Little does Hall know these names will prove prophetic,
25:29because Phobos is doomed to, one day, bring destruction to its home planet.
25:36Phobos is drifting towards Mars.
25:39And at this point, we're catching Phobos almost at the last minute of its life.
25:44It's going to, first of all, break up and turn into a ring of debris around Mars.
25:51And then, if it doesn't burn up, it's going to crash somewhere along the equator of Mars.
25:5650 million years from now, who knows where humanity will be,
25:59but if we are living on Mars, we're going to have a shower of debris.
26:06So, at some point in the future, if we have a human presence there at the time, Phobos will eventually
26:13rain down onto Mars, causing significant devastation.
26:18While it's an extraordinarily long time from now, the prospect of Phobos crashing into the red planet could mean the
26:26end of any human settlement we've managed to place on Mars by then.
26:34But this scenario isn't the only one that can turn a moon into a dangerous object.
26:41Moons aren't just static worlds orbiting around planets.
26:45Many of them are very dynamic in how their orbits change over time.
26:49We have this concept that there might even be rogue moons.
26:53Moons that have been pulled away from their orbit around the planet for various reasons.
26:58The idea of a rogue moon is that an otherwise happy and stable moon can be perturbed by the close
27:08proximity of the star in that star system or another planetary body.
27:14And it will pull that moon from its orbit.
27:19As it turns out, when a moon leaves its planet and goes rogue, it spells disaster.
27:29Los Angeles, California, October 6th, 2022.
27:34At UCLA, theoretical physicist Brad Hanson publishes a remarkable paper suggesting that moons located throughout the galaxy may be going
27:45rogue and colliding with planets.
27:51Some moons can eventually spiral out to the point where they're no longer bound to their parent planet, but rather
27:58simply become another asteroid orbiting the original parent star.
28:02So they have very similar orbits to the original planet, and so they're going to keep coming back again and
28:07again until eventually they come back and impact the planet.
28:11According to Hanson's study, rogue moons that have been ripped from their orbit can be catastrophic when they whip around
28:19a star and slam into their home planet.
28:24Usually moons are significantly smaller than the planets that they orbit, and so in that case, the impact of this
28:33theoretical rogue moon, it wouldn't destroy that planet, but it is big enough to sterilize it.
28:41A mass extinction event could be caused by the impact of a rogue moon into a planet.
28:48A planet getting taken out by a collision with its own rogue moon is unsettling.
28:55And it begs the question, could our moon ever lose its gravitational bond with Earth and crash into our planet?
29:05When you think of the moon, you think of something that's eternal, something that's been there since time immemorial.
29:13But then you begin to realize that the orbit of the moon is actually not so stable.
29:19It's actually leaving us at about the rate of one and a half inches per year.
29:25So this means that it will eventually reach a point where it's just about to leave the planet Earth.
29:32If it goes too far, the moon's orbit could become unstable and then become unbound.
29:39It could leave the orbit around the Earth.
29:42That instability is very difficult to compute.
29:46Many possibilities are there.
29:48The potential for chaos is always there.
29:51We talk about how the dinosaurs underwent extinction through an asteroid collision.
29:57That was estimated to be about 10 kilometers in size.
30:01The moon is thousands of kilometers in size.
30:03So it would be a genuine global catastrophe of something the size of the moon here to the Earth.
30:09While the ultimate fate of our moon is something we may not be able to predict,
30:12what about other moons, both inside and outside our solar system?
30:18How concerned should we be about the possibility of rogue moons reaching us from other corners of the galaxy?
30:26Rogue moons probably happen more often than we think out there in the cosmos.
30:32Whether or not we end up having to worry about our own moon becoming rogue,
30:35it doesn't mean we don't have to keep looking for rogue moons from elsewhere in the solar system.
30:41And it's something we're going to have to deal with probably in our own solar system's future.
30:47When moons become dangerous objects flying through the solar system, we're pretty much helpless to stop them.
30:54Perhaps the solution to protecting Earth and even venturing deeper into space is by building our own man-made moon.
31:07The moon.
31:08The moon.
31:08Kazakhstan.
31:09October 4th, 1957.
31:12The Soviet Union launches a revolutionary piece of technology that will change the course of the 20th century.
31:19A polished aluminum device named Sputnik.
31:23sputnik it is the very first artificial satellite in history and is by most definitions
31:32a man-made moon today a new moon is in the sky a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit
31:39by a russian
31:39rocket the launch of the sputnik satellite by the ussr was a watershed moment for us in changing
31:48the way we looked at moons the sputnik satellite itself was characterized as a new moon a baby moon
31:56in newspapers at the time it caused panic in the united states because this meant that the ussr
32:05was always watching sputnik was really the first artificial moon it was the first thing orbiting the
32:12earth besides our natural moon and it was a metal ball about this big around a little bigger than a
32:18basketball and it beat as it went around the earth every 90 minutes and that's about all it did but
32:25you would have thought the world was coming to an end the press was rife with headlines about
32:30reds orbit artificial moon it was cited over san francisco it's the end of the world and it really
32:36got the west riled up this fairly innocuous little metal sphere was really the kickoff for the whole
32:44space race and that's what ultimately took us to the moon today we're surrounded by thousands of
32:51artificial moons called satellites orbiting the earth but shortly after the launch of sputnik one soviet
32:58scientists suggested an artificial moon might already exist and be orbiting around the planet mars
33:09moscow russia 1959 at the sternberg astronomical institute renowned ukrainian astrophysicist
33:18yosef shilovsky makes a shocking proposal shilovsky suggests that phobos one of mars two moons
33:26could be hollow and artificially constructed from a thin sheet of metal from the size of phobos
33:33and the rate at which phobos was migrating towards mars schlowski determined that phobos could be
33:41something that was almost hollow and just had a very thin shell close to what we might call the density
33:49of an empty can of soda schlowski proposed that phobos might actually be a station or ship built by an
33:59extraterrestrial civilization on mars it could be the last vestige of an alien civilization still in orbit
34:06around the planet now that of course was an extraordinary claim nearly 20 years later 1976
34:14nasa's viking one spacecraft performed an up-close flyby of mars and sent back photographic evidence
34:22that phobos was in fact a dry and dusty natural moon even though we now know that phobos is definitely
34:30not a martian station or spaceship from a martian civilization i think this was sort of the dawn of the
34:38era of thinking of gigantic stations where a civilization could actually create objects mechanisms
34:47vessels that could be of cosmic or astronomical proportions to the point of being the size of a
34:54little world it may sound bizarre to consider building an artificial moon but honestly every
35:00single satellite we've sent up is an artificial tiny moon the sputnik satellite itself was small it was
35:09about two and a half feet in diameter but its implications were profound now you have larger
35:16structures like the space station mirror we had for a while or the international space station we currently
35:22have those are like a football field in length they're getting much bigger there can be some practical
35:29uses for artificial moons i think one of the most profound suggestions has been from buzz aldrin himself
35:37second man to walk on the moon who suggested something called the lunar cycler and these are
35:43moon-sized objects that could be artificially constructed you can use them for fuel depots you can use them for
35:50reprovisioning stops they could be facilities for people on their way deeper into the solar system
35:55and so you have this big comfortable well protected enormous facility moved into a long
36:04permanent looping orbit between the earth and mars or earth and the moon
36:10in 1976 gerald o'neill physicist at princeton university speculated about building what are called now o'neill cylinders
36:21where long cylinders could be spun around so that centrifugal force could approximate the experience of
36:28gravity inside the structures to house people living in these huge space stations built in orbit around
36:35earth or around the other planets but if you want something that is moon-sized you're getting into the
36:42realm of billions or trillions or quadrillions of dollars it's going to be very very expensive currently out of
36:49reach of today's technology but it may be that in the future these things actually become possibilities
36:55while building a moon-sized space station might be currently out of reach
36:59turning the earth's moon into a destination for humans is closer than ever the big question is how
37:06how will we survive on the moon
37:14oracle arizona march 15 2024 the crew of imagination one completes a six-day mission inside a sealed moon
37:24simulator known as sam or space analog for the moon and mars
37:31their mission to simulate what life might be like for humans living on the moon
37:39sam is a hermetically sealed research habitat that demonstrates what it would be like to live on
37:44another celestial body like the moon or mars you're actually able to move around and even bounce around
37:51as if you were on the surface of the moon at this point in time with the nasa artemis missions
37:56and others we're looking at going back to the moon and establishing long-term habitation
38:01it is so exciting that we are going back to the moon hopefully within this decade
38:07while sam is used for scientific research into how we can survive on the moon
38:11another chief goal of the project is getting everyday people involved in space exploration
38:18enter imagination one in the case of imagination one our crew was made up of four different professional
38:28artists and our mission was to demonstrate what artists can bring to a scientific endeavor like
38:35space flight when we imagine going to the moon and living there for a more extended amount of time
38:42it will be important that we have people from all kinds of different backgrounds because the more
38:47perspectives we can have the better decisions i think we can make no matter what an astronaut's
38:53background is the experience in such a lunar simulator gives just a glimpse of what a truly alien
38:59experience living on the moon will be when the moment comes that we actually pull down on that handle
39:06for that outer door sealing ourselves off hermetically from the outside there's this real sense of
39:12separation a sense that you've left what you know behind and there are many things that feel different
39:18living in a space that's pressurized in the spacesuit you don't have the same kind of fine motor
39:24control that you would normally there's a sense of separation from the way you normally would move through the
39:30world there's going to be a lot of difficulties that the first inhabitants are going to experience
39:35a lot of our dreams and excitement and aspirations about long-term habitation in space come really
39:40from those two weeks that we set foot on the moon in the 60s and 70s the moon as an
39:46alien place is
39:47really a foreign place there's still a lot to be discovered and to be understood and i think there's
39:52just an excitement around that discovery it's still just a foreign land
39:58the prospect of finally living on the earth's moon is exciting
40:03but our moon is just one of many equally thrilling and terrifying alien worlds
40:09waiting for us to encounter the moons of our solar system are a key part of exploration
40:16mostly because if we want to go to places we can't land on gas giants but we can land on
40:24their moons and so
40:25the moons provide us with this solid surface where we can land potentially as a jumping off point for
40:34further space adventures the population of moons and especially the moons of the gas giant planets but
40:42even including the moons of earth and mars are such a diverse population of objects and this is something
40:48we've only appreciated in the past few decades just how unique and interesting each of these objects is
40:57every moon has a story to tell
41:00every moon you can look at it and say how did it get there
41:04what is it made of everyone tells the history of how it came to be where it is
41:10all of a sudden we have this incredible number of places we could go explore
41:15not just the planets themselves but their families of moons
41:19the earth moon is a reference to which we can now also compare other moons
41:25and see how alien they are in the solar system
41:31today we're closer than ever to constructing a permanent base on earth's moon
41:38is this an important first step that will eventually lead us to reaching alien moons
41:43and if so what will we find when we get to these strange new worlds it's exciting to think about
41:51but
41:52for now these exotic and far away moons remain unexplored and unexplained
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