Remember gazing up at the moon and wondering what it’s made of? Some pretty smart people are doing the same thing today. And it’s not childlike curiosity that’s motivating them: It’s money.
Moon draws growing interest as a potential source of rare minerals
Illustration by Michael Sloan
Interest in materials known as rare earth elements surged when China temporarily blocked exports in 2010. Manufacturers started looking everywhere for new supplies of gadolinium and terbium and other elements used in televisions, hybrid car batteries and many other products. The search took them to such places as California, the Pacific ocean floor and the moon. The moon’s stock is up even among politicians, as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney recently sparred over whether it makes sense to invest in lunar mining.
Rare earth elements aren’t the only potentially valuable resources on the moon. Helium-3, an isotope that in the future may support cold fusion when earthlings finally figure out how to make it happen, is another potential treasure. Helium-3 is a component of the solar wind, which is constantly blowing outward from the sun. Our atmosphere blocks helium-3 from reaching Earth’s surface. The moon doesn’t have much atmosphere, so scientists speculate that there may be more than a million tons of the isotope up there.
Ready to grab your moon pick, pull on your moon boots and heigh-ho your way into a moon mine? Not so fast. There’s a vast amount of research that needs to be done first.
For starters, scientists say, we need to figure out where the moon came from and what it’s made of.
“Although we broadly know the composition of the moon, it’s slightly embarrassing to admit that the exact origin and evolution is not totally tied down,” says John Zarnecki, a professor and space researcher at Britain’s Open University.
The dominant theory is that a Mars-size object struck Earth 4.5 billion years ago, breaking off a bunch of material that melded together to form the moon. If this theory is correct, we can expect that the moon is made of roughly the same chemical building blocks as Earth. The 1,500 or so pounds of material that U.S. and Soviet explorers brought back from the moon during the 1960s and 1970s provided some support for the theory.
NASA sent up an imaging spectrometer called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper on an Indian rocket in 2008. A mechanical failure cut the mission short, but it did provide evidence that there is water on the moon. It also suggested that the moon was once molten. That’s an incredibly important finding because it’s not enough that the moon contain valuable resources; any hope of mining them requires that they be concentrated so that they can be extracted from a small number of locations.
While the moon doesn’t have as broad a range of geologic processes as Earth — there is no indication of plate tectonics, for example — the cooling-down of a molten rock would help to sort the minerals. Different materials would settle and solidify at different layers.
That’s just a start, though. It will take much more research to find the most concentrated deposits of whatever resources exist.
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