From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 381, two NASA Artemis experts discuss how the agency is preparing future moonwalkers to use new tools to explore the unique science near the lunar South Pole. This episode was recorded February 28, 2025.
Transcript
Joseph Zakrzewski
Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. Episode 381, Commercial Lunar Tools and Science. I’m Joseph Zakrzewski, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more. When humans first set foot on the moon during the Apollo program, they relied on specialized tools to help them explore the lunar surface and collect valuable samples, while those tools serve their purpose, the Artemis generation of lunar explorers will face a new set of challenges, particularly at the moon’s south pole, a rugged landscape with challenging lighting conditions. To conduct meaningful science and exploration in this extreme environment, astronauts will need cutting edge tools that are durable and optimized for use with modern space suits. That’s where NASA’s Extra Vehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program, or EHP, comes in. This program is partnering with US industry to develop new space suits lunar tools and mobility solutions that will enable safe and effective exploration on the moon. We’ll be taking a closer look at each of these critical components and continue our EHP series today with lunar hardware and tools joining us on this episode are Holly Newton Mejia NASA’s Eva tools project manager and Dr Juliane Gross The Artemis sample curation lead from NASA’s Astro materials research and exploration science or ARIES division, together, they help design, develop and test the tools that will enable astronauts to perform literal groundbreaking science on the lunar surface. Let’s dig in. You.
<Intro Music>
Hello, Dr Gross and Holly, thank you so much for joining us on Houston We Have a Podcast today?
Holly Newton Mejia
Yep, thanks.
Juliane Gross
Thanks for having us.
Joseph Zakrzewski
I love getting to know everyone’s origin story, because everyone comes from a different background, especially with something as unique as talking about Lunar Science and the tools that will be used to help conduct that. Holly, I’ll start with you. How did you become where you are currently, today, and how did you arrive at NASA?
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah. So it kind of starts back in high school, when I decided I want to be in engineering. I was part of the robotics team and loved engineering. So that made me decide, okay, I want to be an engineer. What kind of engineer? So we took some we did some courses in school studying different types of engineering. And I discovered aerospace and thought, hey, that is really cool, launching things into space, rockets, all of that sounds super interesting to me. So for college, I majored in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. So that’s where I’m from. Is from Minnesota, and from there, I ended up working in a lab with a professor who was working on Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles, and he had been an intern at NASA at one point, and he talked to me one day, and he’s like, Holly, do you want to work for NASA? And I’m like, I didn’t even know that was an option. Like, yes, I would love to do that. So he said, go apply to some internship programs. So I applied to as many NASA internships as I could possibly find, and ended up in the NASA Pathways Program at Johnson Space Center. And I got here, and I got to try out a whole bunch of different groups, and it was so cool. I had such a great experience with everybody here, but the one that I loved the most was EVA tools. So that is where I ended up. Now I am currently a project manager in the EVA Tools group. So I like to call ourselves the hardware store for the astronauts. We build any sort of like tools, like hammers or or wrenches, anything you can think of in hardware store. We make that for for the astronauts to use on their spacewalks.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Wow, that’s fantastic. And Dr, Juliane, where did how did you come to NASA?
Juliane Gross
My story is a little bit different, and probably started when I was about six and I wanted to be either an astronaut or a farmer, because clearly these two things are related to each other. And then, yeah, so I was born and raised in Germany, so if you know, you might hear an accent or something. I went to school there. I went to university there. Didn’t really know what I wanted to do in high school, and sort of fell into geology at the university and studied Earth. And really loved going out into the field, figuring out how volcanoes work, and you know, how rocks work in general. And really liked that rocks contain all this, all these stories about how the earth functions, basically. So I did my masters in Germany on rocks. Then did my PhD with rocks and experiments. And then towards the end of my PhD, I saw a job advertisement at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, where they advertised a position to work with space rocks. And I was like, oh, man, that’s so cool. Like, I remember when I was six, I wanted to be an astronaut, which I had totally forgotten about. And so I was like, Oh, I’m just gonna apply, because I have nothing to lose. Is a good practice to, like, speak English, or, like, learn how to speak English, right? Um, so I applied. Um, never in a million years, thought that they would like invite me to give a, like, interview talk, but they did, and I must have really liked what they heard, because they were like, we’re hiring you. And then I had to, like, move to to the US, and had to explain to my family that I’m leaving, yeah. And then I really fell in love with looking at moon rocks and and Martian samples, and I stayed with that. And then after I did my postdoc in Houston, I became a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Moved there for like three years, and then the Rutgers University in New Jersey hired me as a planetary science professor. So I’m going from like somebody who had never in her life taken any planetary science classes, I didn’t even know that existed, to suddenly teaching planetary science classes. So that was interesting. And then I got approached by NASA in 2019 and they asked if I would come and help open the last or one of the last Apollo samples that they had stored away for the future. And I was like, Man, that’s like a lifetime opportunity. Of course, I’m gonna do that. How am I not gonna do that. And so I moved back to Houston for three years and helped open that sample and dissect that sample and like sort of study that went back to Rutgers, because I was on loan to NASA, basically, from Rutgers, and then went back to ruckus to teach for another year. At some point during that journey, I became a US citizen, and so then the position at NASA became available to be the Artemis sample curation lead. So I applied. Again, Had nothing to lose, and they hired me, and now I’m responsible to help NASA return new samples from the moon, and doing that in a safe and exciting way. So wow, that’s how I got here.
Joseph Zakrzewski
That is amazing, both stories, and it’s fun to know that everything started with that spark at such a young age, and then, like you said, just nothing to lose. I’ll take my chance and take a shot at it and and here we are, and these it’s a fascinating topic to now dive into tools themselves and how we develop tools, because, as you mentioned, going back to the Apollo era, that’s the last time that we had been on the moon. A lot of time has passed. A lot of understanding has happened. A lot of technology advancements have become so to know of the science and to know of the hardware, and have both of you here is fascinating. And let’s go ahead and dive into that too. My first real question is really kind of the process that it has to take, and how you two might work together to start the design and development of these, I guess, new rounds of tools and what can withstand such a harsh environment, because so much has changed from Apollo and those experiences that those astronauts had to what might be foreseen here coming up with the Artemis campaign and Dr Juliane. I’ll start with you. How has your understanding of the lunar surface, what it’s composed of, how it really emphasizes what needs to be done to develop for Holly and her team the next round of tools, and how can that best be benefited and across all all aspects.
Juliane Gross
That’s a good question during Apollo in the beginning, we didn’t really know what the moon was made of and how our own environment on Earth might affect the samples. And it turns out that the earth environment, and really anything that the samples come in contact with, changes the samples. So you can think of the rocks as books, because they contain all these stories that they preserved over the last 4.5 billion years. And every time you expose that rock book to an environment that it didn’t originate from, you’re basically starting to rip pages out, right? So if it’s just a few pages, you can still extract the story and kind of understand it. Once you start ripping out whole chapters, is going to get harder and harder to really understand what the rock is trying to tell you. So we’ve learned that with certain materials, we can’t extract the stories that the rocks contain for us. So let’s say we have a tool, and the tool is lead lined, for example, we use lead inside the rocks that are naturally trapped inside the rock as a as a tool to date the rocks, to extract the age of when the rock formed, whether it formed, for example, at an impact event. Right? That impact event most likely also affected Earth. So we want to extract the timeline of what happened throughout the solar system at different time periods. Time periods, because we’ll learn about our own planet. Now, if we use a tool that is lead lined, we’re adding extra lead to the sample that we don’t know that we did that or how much we did it. And so now if we use lead to age date that rock, we will get a false age. So we are changing the story by using materials that are not really compatible with our samples, and so that’s how we work together, figuring out what materials are compatible or allowed to be used. How clean do the tools and containers need to be? Let’s say we want to deliver them dry to the surface, right? If we’re interested in any rock ice interaction we might find in the south polar region, we want to make sure that the tools are not pre contaminated with terrestrial water, because now we can’t understand where that water is coming from, or what the original composition of the ice is that we might find on the moon. And so that’s sort of how we work together. I’m coming from the sample perspective, being the voice or representing the interest of the samples to make sure we we protect them from us, because they’re so ah, I want, I don’t want to say valuable, but they’re, they’re easily destroyed, right? And then I can feed that information to Holly, and she can be like, great, we’re going to build the drive tubes out of aluminum, because we can X ray them or CT scan them later on without opening the samples and exposing them to air. That’s sort of how we how we interact, and one feeds into the other. Yeah,
Holly Newton Mejia
yeah. And it’s definitely kind of a give and take, because, like, and this is something different, too, than what they did in Apollo, because they hadn’t been to the moon yet. They didn’t know it was there. So, so we’re kind of taken a different look at tools. But, like, there’s sometimes where it’s like, Okay, you tell us, from the science perspective, what is the best material we’ll go then test and see if it’ll work. Because, like, in some cases, like, you have a hammer head, you can’t make it out of aluminum. It won’t break a rock, like, so we have to kind of go back and forth and say, Okay, we can’t use this. Can we use this other material that’ll get you kind of closer, but it’s kind of a back and forth to see what what you need from a science perspective, and what you feasibly have to do to make it work the way it’s supposed to.
Joseph Zakrzewski
It’s wonderful example of knowledge that you obtained from the past to help educate and advance what you want to do in the future. And that’s I guess, Holly. My question to you is obtaining all this information and working with Dr. Gross, you gave a great example there. But have there been other lessons that you’ve learned or collaborated on to you know, take what was learned from the Apollo, I’ll call it the Apollo experience, and what those astronauts, you know, accomplished on the lunar surface to help influence the designs for the Artemis campaign?
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah, we took a lot of lessons learned from Apollo. So in some cases. So one of the beauty, too, of the Apollo tools is they iterated on them every after every mission, so they consistently got better and better. So by Apollo 17, we had a really good starting point of like, okay, this is where we’re going to start. We know this is like the best of the best they had in Apollo, and then from there. So we could take, for example, the spread of different types of tools from Apollo, Apollo 17, and say, Okay, we probably know we need at least these items. And then we go talk with the scientists. Say, what else could we add to the list? So, for example, in Apollo, they didn’t have a chisel to help break off those chips of rock. They just had a hammer to do it, so we added a chisel to it and say, Okay, this will help make it easier to do that. We also took some lessons learned for things that didn’t go well. Yep. So one of the main things being the dust. We call it dust tolerance of a mechanism. So basically, when the lunar regolith gets into the mechanism, sometimes that causes it to not work anymore. And that happened a lot in Apollo. Lot of things didn’t function. So we we were able to do testing here on the ground with lunar Simulant and design mechanisms so that they would function with the dust environment and aren’t going to bind up and and break
Joseph Zakrzewski
it’s fascinating and it’s fun. You learn a lot from what works well and work doesn’t work well. And you impart all this knowledge, and you have these decades of experience now of what you’ve attained from the science and understanding the lunar rocks themselves to the hardware themselves. Now in the era of the Artemis campaign, and working with commercial partners, NASA gets to be that standard of information, that gold standard, if you will, of of imparting that wisdom to companies that are aiding in that Artemis campaign. How have those conversations been like? Dr Gross, I’ll start with you, with with, you know, having people from commercial entities come in and try and understand what the compositions are. And you can only learn so much from the history books and learn so much from from public but to have first hand experience of the science and seeing in the lunar labs themselves the actual samples, that kind of takes the understanding and and research and development to another level.
Juliane Gross
Yeah, we do have regular conversations with the vendors, and we try to bring them into the lab so they can see the Apollo samples, and we’ll talk about why we want to preserve the integrity of the samples, what we will lose on the science side if, if we don’t worry about contamination, for example, we develop training lectures, like two hour long miniature workshops that we then present to the vendors, that then really brings together. Of like, why we’re going to the moon, why we are collecting samples, why we worry about contamination. What are volatiles? Why that is important. And then sort of lessons learned from Apollo going forward, to Artemis, and so we do as best as we can, try to communicate with them what we kind of need or want, want, our desires.
Joseph Zakrzewski
but understood. And I think that’s to open up the NASA wealth of knowledge probably helps too. And on the design side as well, you’ve probably shown you know, here’s what has worked well. Here is what maybe not, has worked well. But on that note too. This is, and I’m kind of pivoting a little bit. This is in reference to the Apollo missions and what the lessons learned there. Now the aim is to the south pole, or near the South Pole. How has that science and how has that hardware development changed at all from what we’ve learned in the past to what we’re applying to today? Or is it maybe just somewhat starting over again?
Juliane Gross
It’s almost starting over again, almost. So when we went to the moon with Apollo, that wasn’t really based on science, that was more based on like proving technologies or showing we can do it and we can do it safely, and then returning samples later on, once we had orbiters going around the moon, we recognized that all the samples that were taken from Apollo came from a geologically speaking, very unique, very interesting region that is not representative for the rest of the moon. So you can think of if I were going to give you six missions, and then you take your missions and land them all in Yellowstone National Park, and you collect 382 kilograms of rocks, which is the amount that the astronauts brought back. You get, geologically speaking, really interesting samples, right? It’s a super volcano. They’re hydrothermal vents as a geyser, stuff like that. Very cool samples not representative for the rest of the United States, and so the same holds for the moon. The Apollo samples are really cool, but they’re not representative all our hypotheses of how the earth Moon system formed the giant impact that made the earth and the moon the last 4.5 billion years. How the earth Moon system evolved over time and in space is based on non representative samples. So going back to the south polar region, which is more representative than Apollo, we can now collect more samples and use them, sort of as as cornerstones, or as key samples to test all these hypotheses that we came up with and see if we were right or not. I secretly hope we’re not right so we can rewrite history books, but that is, scientifically, we’re going to a region that is very, very, very different from all the Apollo regions. And that’s, that’s the exciting part. Plus, we know that there’s water around which is a resource that if we want to explore space, more would be a resource that would be really great to utilize. You can take the water and, like, turn it into rocket fuel, right, launching from the moon to to explore the solar systems, much easier than Earth. And so we want to know what resource is there and what form, what composition is there that we can use it. So going to the south polar region is very, very exciting for a multitude of reasons, and for the tools we have to think about, what is a regolith, like the soil that is maybe baked in with ice. How is that gonna behave when you try to hammer a drive tube into it, right?
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah, so, that there’s definitely some that, if there’s some areas that I feel like are very similar to Apollo, and then there’s some that we have definitely had to kind of revise for that new environment, particularly the exactly, thank you. That’s what I was trying to think of. The word for Yeah, is that it is so much colder. There’s, like, a lot of the materials they used in Apollo, we can definitely use some of them, like, but then there’s some, for example, that type of core sample, like, we have to be very particular about the material, or how you store it, or making sure you don’t touch it with your glove and heat it up and then heat up the sample that you’re collecting. Me very sad if you do. Yeah. So definitely, I feel like the process of using how you use a tool changes. The the types of tools we have are very some of them are very similar. Some are new, but the way you use it, like, don’t touch the surface of the tool that is actually collecting the sample, but touch the handle part of it. So we can, we design that those a little differently, or redesign it to make it not intuitive to touch the head so that they do reach for the handle, and make it easier to preserve that sample.
Joseph Zakrzewski
That’s fascinating to know, and if you don’t mind, I’d love to dive into that a little bit more too, just because of for those you know, listening at home. You know, what makes these tools so unique and different from say, tools that we might use for Home Repair and day to day use, and you kind of gave a great example of, you can’t have this exposed to this, or you can’t touch this, but you can touch that part. How challenging has that been in the design and development, knowing that it’s, it’s, it can be finicky at times. It can be very sensitive in certain areas with depending on how that development shakes out.
Holly Newton Mejia
It is definitely challenging, but that is what makes my job fun, is trying to figure out, how do you make a tool that works with the space suit and works in the environment that you’re looking at? So the reason you can’t buy something off the shelf and just use it, one big thing is materials for it, for the Lunar environment. If you buy a hammer that has like a rubber hammer handle to it, that rubber is going to get brittle, and you’re going to break your tool.
Juliane Gross
You’re going to contaminate my samples with that space Exactly
Holly Newton Mejia
Exactly, yeah, you don’t always know where the material, the lineage of that material, is. The other thing is just making it compatible with the space suit. So anytime you’re picking something up in space suit gloves, it’s like, it’s like wearing big like ski gloves that are also inflated. It’s not easy. So we have to make design handles that are easier to grip or easy for them to the astronauts to hold in their hand without having to really squeeze their hand close all the time, because that’s a really exhausting motion. It’s like squeezing a stress ball like over and over again. And you ask them to do that for an eight hour space walk, that’s a long time, and their hand is going to be they’re going to be tired or not able to do as much. So we really try and design things of, how can we not wear out the crew? How can we make it, make it easier for them to hold things, easier for them to operate?
Joseph Zakrzewski
That is incredible. But at the same time too, like there has to be so many innovations that come from that and understanding the spacesuit, the person in the spacesuit, the environment that you’re in, the location that you’re in, what kind of samples you’re trying to design or trying to obtain for Dr gross, and I go back to you with that, knowing you gave a great example about the lead in in the previous Apollo eras, and knowing that you’re introducing another element into into your sample. Have there been other innovations similar to that that you’ve worked with the design and development team to try and help contain and accumulate as much of a pure sample that you’re desiring to study and understand.
Juliane Gross
Yeah, specifically when we go and sample the subsurface or colder regions where we’re hoping to find maybe some ice or regolith, where the ice is mixed in, we want to capture that, and we want to bring that back, and we want to analyze that so we can understand where the water and the solar system is coming from, ultimately, where the water on Earth is coming from, how old it is, how it was delivered, and by what it was delivered. So building a vacuum sealed container is really important, or has been really important. And so we worked with the tools team to come up with a, what we call primary sealed container. We put, you take your drive tube, and you have the sample from the subsurface, and you put it in a primary sealed container. You seal it on the surface, under vacuum, so to speak, and then you would return that to Earth, and we would then keep it under vacuum, and then eventually extract the gas, because the water will turn. Into into gas, into gas eventually. That is challenging, because we have to think about leak rates. What we don’t want to happen is that you seal it on the surface, you put it into the crew habitat. When they return. It takes 10 days, right? And we don’t want crew air to start leaking into that container, right? And so we need to make sure that that really seals well, which is a challenge because the lunar surface is really freaking dusty, and as soon as you had a little dust screen in there, it might not see well. And so that is, that is an area of like innovation, maybe as well, you would call it where we’re still working and trying to figure out how to maximize the scientific value that we can bring back from these samples.
Joseph Zakrzewski
So we’ve taken what we’ve learned from our Apollo experiences and all the tools that have been designed, the samples that have been collected, and we’ve understood them to their fullest or still understanding them to their fullest extent. But how have we now moved to the Artemis campaign and designed the government references for the next line of tools for our commercial partners to build off of.
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah, very good question. So we have so we started off with developing the government reference design looking at Apollo like I said, we kind of looked at Apollo 17. So we took what, what things were used most heavily, things like the hammer, the scoop was used a ton like they loved the scoop to collect those big, big shovels full of regolith. So we took that and then we’re like, okay, what is something we can improve upon and allow us to do more things this time around? So one of them is allowing, is creating tools to allow the crew members to sample by themselves, like take samples by themselves. So during Apollo, they had to use the buddy system. One person would hold open the bag and the other person would pick it up with with their tongs, and then drop the rock into the bag. So in the government reference design tools, we added something that’s kind of a spin off of an ISS tool. So on the ISS, we have the mini workstation. It’s like a little tool belt that they carry and they they tether all their tools to. So we, we started to develop the lunar tool belt that you can it’s like it sounds, it attaches to the space suit, and it basically gives you a third and a fourth arm that you can now have your sample bags on, so you don’t have to have your buddy hold it the the two astronauts can walk in the opposite direction, take their tool in their hand, have their sampling things on their belt. Walk over, take their sample open up their bag and their tool belt holds it holds a steady for them so they can take that. So that was one of the biggest, I think, development innovations since Apollo was trying to figure out that process of allowing them to do it themselves and not, not always have to rely on each other, because if you can walk in different directions, you can get more samples
Juliane Gross
Exactly, exactly or more efficient, right? We can collect more samples during a given EVA time, which is exactly what we want. So that was super exciting.
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah, a couple other ones that were new, looking into a portable light. So the south pole is like darker, and it wasn’t Apollo. What kind of lighting do we need to help them navigate around and walk around the lunar surface. What types of dust mitigation tools do we need? So we didn’t know at the time of Apollo what that regolith looked like. It’s like, and please correct me if I’m wrong. Dr, Gross, but like, it’s like, so Sticky, sticky and and sharp, like it doesn’t have erosion, so it’s like, tiny little shards of glass. Yeah,
Juliane Gross
yeah. I think about like, smashing a glass bottle into teeny, teeny, tiny pieces, and then that’s what you’re walking on. That’s what gets stuck to your suit and the tool. So they start abrading the tools and starts, you know, abrading the suit, it’s gonna get really hard to move in. So we don’t like the dust, yeah, so I like it from a science perspective.
Holly Newton Mejia
So yeah, how can we, like, design the tools to account for that desk, but also, how can we try and not bring it into the cabin with them and have the astronauts inhale it like, and inhale these sharp little shards? Yeah. So, yeah. So those were a lot of, lot of different areas where we tried to kind of think about, we tried to use what Apollo had, and then think about, how can we. Do it slightly differently
Joseph Zakrzewski
And bringing in the commercial partners with axiom and for the Artemis III campaign and the return to the lunar surface. How has these references and these designs been fed to commercial partners and that design process?
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah, so we we basically show them. Here’s what we have so far, kind of transferred all of that information to them, and then from there, we have kind of gotten into this phase of trying to answer questions for them, so doing things like testing the tools and trying to give them some some answers and help help advise the commercial partners as they further develop the tools.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And all that to further learner science through the Artemis campaign and, Dr Gross, going back to you and learning more about we’ve covered the kind of the history of the tools and their uses, and what we’re hoping to accomplish now going to a different area of the moon and what those tools could possibly accomplish there. Dr Gross, why is the lunar sample return, namely, from the south pole, so important? And why are you and other scientists hoping or hoping to learn from these samples.
Juliane Gross
Good question, as I said before, Apollo was taken from a really unique, geologically speaking area that is not representative for the rest of the moon. So going back to the south polar region with Artemis, is where we’re hoping to collect key samples to test all these hypotheses. There are sort of like four major science goals we’re trying to address. One is to understand the impact bombardment history that happened in our solar system. The Moon is the best and most accessible place in our solar system, to really understand planet altering processes that affected, sort of our little corner of the universe. The bombardment history that the moon has recorded and preserved in its rocks tells us the story about the last 4.5 billion years that affected every single planetary body in our in our system that has a direct influence on life on our own planet. So that was like a big spike, we think, in the impact history in the earth Moon system, around 3.5, 4 billion years. And after that died down, is when life emerged on our planet, right? And so is that a coincidence? In order to test that, we need to really get to the oldest impact basin that the moon has recorded, and that is the South Pole Atkin basin. And so we want to find materials from that we don’t have that. So we don’t know what the oldest impact material is, or impact event that happened and that influenced the earth Moon system. We want to look at the volatiles, which are like water or CO2, any, any type of gasses that that frees out on the on the poles because it’s so cold there. So we can understand how, how we can use that as a resource, how old it is, where it’s coming from, how that had influenced water on our own planet, right? Is that an infinite, or finite like resource we have on our own planet? We do want to understand how planets in general, form and evolve through space and time. And the moon is a test bed, so to speak, for that for us to understand how planets can form, and then how do they make crusts, and how big do you have to be in order to hold an atmosphere, things like that, because that, you know, has influences on other planets, like Mars. And then the last thing we really want to understand this is how the the regolith sort of like, what kind of properties it has, what the variability is. So we want to look at the chemistry. We want to look at the geotechnical properties, at the physical properties, to understand how space weathering works on bodies that doesn’t have an don’t have an atmosphere, right? And then we can extrapolate all of that data and all that knowledge to other planetary bodies like mercury or asteroids who also don’t have atmospheres. And we can understand how the sun radiation is changing the surface, what the cosmic, galactic X rays are. So from that, we can get information of how our location within our galaxy has changed over the last four point billion years, 4.5 billion years. And so there’s a lot of that information stored in the polar regions that we haven’t quite understood how that works, which is why this is so exciting to go there and bring back these more representative samples to test all these new questions we came up with by looking at Apollo samples. And so I can’t wait to go
Joseph Zakrzewski
and with that too, from the excitement of what you can uncover here when everything returns to Earth, those that are doing the work, the crew members, aren’t necessarily geologists by trade. They might not know what to look for or how to approach it, or how to extract that information that you’re looking for. How between Holly and Dr Gross, how have the conversations been with crew mates, with the Artemis astronauts, on obtaining that information and making sure that. We acquire what you’re looking for.
Juliane Gross
Yeah, we actually train them so they get geology training, then get lunar geology training and field training. We have built a very rigorous plan. We have a we have a geology training team, basically. And we, we put together a rigorous plan of like, all the things I need to learn, and that includes the science of it, right? They need to understand the geologic processes that they’re going to see. They need to understand how to identify a sample on the surface, what type of sample that is, and how that feeds back into answering science questions, so that in the worst case, and they get cut off, and the science evaluation room, which where we’re going to sit in we can’t talk to them anymore because we lost comm signal or whatever, that they have enough knowledge that they can make informed choices of which sample is will best address the science goals, and so that’s the one that they collect. So we go through a lot of training with them to learn how to identify, classify, describe samples, what type of pictures they need to take so that we can really get the samples with the geologic context, which is extremely important. We take them into the field, so that they get field geology, field experience, right? Because it’s one thing to learn this in a classroom or bring them into the Apollo lab, but it’s a different thing once you’re out in the field and you’re in front of, like, a big outcrop, when you’re like, which area should I sample now, right? Like, that’s a whole different cognitive skill that they need to learn. And so there’s a lot of geology training that goes into crew training that’s so we’re working with FOD to make that happen, and that includes the testing of the tools eventually
Holly Newton Mejia
Yeah so once they go through some of that geology training. We go out and do tests with the crew members and with the flight operations folks to go and practice. So they’re using the skills they learned in geology training, and then they’re using the government reference design tools, and we’re sending them out to places like in Arizona or Nevada or Iceland, places that are representative of the moon or a representative the type of sampling operations you’re going to do. And we have them go out and practice and figure out kind of what is the game plan. How are they going to communicate with the scientists back on Earth to decide which sample do we want to take? And then they’re going to practice like, Okay, this is the tool that I need to take this type of sample. This is the procedure I need to go through to make sure I don’t contaminate it as much as possible. This is where all of the once I bag it up, where do I store it? And they kind of practice the whole operation. And then that also allows us to kind of evaluate and get feedback from the crew members. And they can say, hey, like that. It’d be really great if the tool had something like this, and sometimes we can make it, we can advise the commercial partners on it. Sometimes we’re like, that’s great. Sorry, you’re gonna have, I can’t do that. So it’s kind of a give and take. It’s a learning experience to go out in the field for everybody involved. You learn about the tools, you learn about how the communication flow, and kind of help us plan for what those our missions are going to look like.
Joseph Zakrzewski
We’ve talked a lot about, you mentioned contaminants. You mentioned bringing back samples in its most pure form. Why is that so important this time around, compared to what these samples you’ve experienced through the Apollo era, Dr Gross, and why you talked about, you know, vacuum seals and and, you know, introducing new elements and new contaminants to try and obtain a fully pure item and bring it back from three days journey from the moon. That’s a hard thing to accomplish. But why? Why is that such a high priority?
Juliane Gross
Well, we want to protect the legacy of the samples that the astronauts are really risking their lives for to bring back right? And we want to preserve as much science as we can from these samples. So if we expose the samples to different elements, or the Earth, Earth atmosphere, where we have a lot of water and organic particles, we’re going to start changing the chemistry of the rocks, and so we’re losing some of the stories that these samples contain. That’s why we are so rigorous about contamination control, minimizing contamination, we want to build contamination knowledge so we understand, if we introduce a different element, how much did we introduce? How is that going to affect the sample or our scientific data? We need that so we can understand, once we extract the science and the science data, how to interpret that data correctly. So once the samples return to Earth, we keep them in glove boxes with nitrogen atmosphere in it. So that’s pure dry curation grade nitrogen, because nitrogen is an inert gas, and that means it just doesn’t like to interact with anything. So you can have the sample sit in there, and you can put your hands in the glove ports and manipulate the samples and break pieces off and send them to scientists and PIs without changing the story of that these rocks contain. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do to keep them as pristine as possible. Um, so we can, we can maximize the science that we can extract from these samples, from these rocks.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And on that note, too, are there new developments in the curation of these samples that you’re anticipating the return from Artemis, I’ve had the very fortunate privilege of of seeing the lunar lab with with you, Dr gross, and seeing what’s there. But I’d imagine knowing that new samples are coming in, and as pristine a condition as you can, you probably want to create an environment that can hold that for as long as possible. How has those developments been like to know that once the sample arrives, it’s going to a home that has utilized decades worth of knowledge and also decades worth of technological advancements?
Juliane Gross
Yeah, so Apollo has been doing a really good job. Our curation has been doing a really good job since Apollo to keep all the samples safe. Once we learned that there’s no harm that come to us from the samples, but there’s harm from us, like harming the samples. And so once they figured that out during Apollo, and they built the current Apollo facility, they have been doing a really good job of keeping the Apollo samples safe, to preserve the integrity. They’re stored in their little containers, in Teflon bags that have nitrogen atmosphere in those bags, and then they’re triply backed, and then they’re stored in canisters in more nitrogen atmosphere. The entire lab is a clean room, there’s only very restricted and limited material access or materials that can be come in contact with the samples in there, and so we will adopt that for Artemis. Artemis III and IV will return samples that have been collected in ambient temperatures and returned in ambient temperatures, meaning room temperature. So they will be stored in in the Apollo curation facility, because it is so well established and and it’s doing such a good job of keeping these samples safe, but we will have new glove boxes that will make the job of processing these samples easier so we can do the preliminary examination more effective. We will we have new tools that we can use to do this job. We have X ray Computer Tomography now. So XCT scanning, which is what everybody knows when you go to the doctor and they shove you in that tube and scan your brain without actually cutting you open. We can do the same thing with rocks now, like we can scan these rocks, we can get 3D images. We can, with that data, sort of slice through it without actually slicing through so we can see what the inside looks like, and then really extract things. So we have new tools and techniques that are developed in curation. And then further out for the Artemis campaign, Artemis five, and further out they are going to return frozen samples. And so we want to make sure that we keep them frozen and then also process them frozen on Earth and store them frozen. And so in curation, we started the process of thinking about cold curation and cryo curation and building a new facility that can facilitate that. So we’re looking into different fields, like on earth, when they process ice cores that they extract from Antarctica, right? That needs to be done, obviously, in cold environments. And so we’re visiting these labs to understand their lessons learned, so we can incorporate that into the new facilities. And then eventually we’re also looking into the medical field, where they can operate on a person with little robot arms, right where the doctor stands in a different room. And does this because if you were building a cryo lab, it would not be so good for sample processes to be in there, freezing at cryo temperatures. And so being in a different room and then doing this with little tweezers on a robot arm is what we want to get to. So there’s a lot of new development coming that way for frozen samples, and then for the ambient samples, we’re utilizing the new technologies, basically that that are around now that we’re not around during. Apollo
Joseph Zakrzewski
I’ve sensed the passion in both of you, and knowing what’s coming for the Artemis campaigns, and just knowing how much we’ve progressed and what we’ve learned from Apollo, but also just the decades of understanding the science and the decades of the tools themselves, building and understanding the new technologies that can go into new reference designs and helping commercial partners design those too. So my last question to both of you, and it kind of, I want to kind of have this come back full circle when it comes to the Lunar Science and the tools that will be designed and developed and working in partnership with others. What if you had to go back and talk to the younger version of yourself that wanted to be an astronaut, and the younger version of yourself that you know was applying to NASA pathways and and seeing the path that this is taking, and what can be coming for Artemis III, Artemis IV, Artemis V, that Dr Gross. Teased. What would you say to a younger version of yourself and why we should be excited about this progression and the science that’s coming?
Holly Newton Mejia
Let’s see. I think I would tell my younger self there is so many cool things awaiting you, like I did not know back then, I would get to work on things that are part of the next mission to the moon that is so crazy cool. Like to be in the shoes that the people were in when they were doing Apollo, like and be following in their footsteps? Yeah, I think, I think it’s kind of mind boggling.
Juliane Gross
Yeah, I feel the same way. I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that I, you know, moved to a country and speak English and work for NASA eventually, like I would be like what I would have not believed myself. But just think, I remember giving a talk when I was a postdoc at the Lunar Planetary Institute, and I asked the question, oh, who in the audience has experienced Apollo, and people were raising their hands, and I was just so jealous that they were around during the first moon landing. And now, you know, here we are preparing to go back to the moon, which is, is basically our Apollo, right? Like Artemis is our Apollo. And I cannot wait to see this happening, and to get to the day where you know they’re stepping foot on the lunar surface in the south polar region, and are like, Whoa. Look at all these cool rocks. And now I’m going to be like, bring them back, every single one. I can’t wait. It’s going to be so exciting. Yeah
Joseph Zakrzewski
I can’t wait to talk to about you even further on down the line, when, when we’re making those progresses, and you’re talking about the talk about the frozen samples and everything coming back, it seems like there’s so much more on the horizon to get excited about. Well, Holly, Dr. Gross, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Holly + Juliane
Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks
Joseph Zakrzewski
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today.
Check nasa.gov for the latest news around the agency. All of our episodes, as well as our sister NASA podcasts, can be found at nasa.gov/podcasts there, you’ll be able to find our previous episode about the extra vehicular activity and human surface mobility programs new space suits, and you can expect another episode about their lunar rovers for the Artemis campaign soon. In the meantime, you can go ahead and find out more about all of EHPs work at nasa.gov/suits-and-rovers. You can follow Johnson Space Center on Facebook, X and Instagram. Use #askNASA on your favorite platform to submit your idea and make sure you mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on Friday, February 28 thanks to Dane Turner, Will Flato, Daniel Tohill, Courtney Beasley, Gary Jordan and Dominique Crespo. Special thanks to Tim Hall and Victoria Ugalde for helping plan this episode, and of course, thanks again to Holly Newton Mejia and Dr. Juliane Gross for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.