Lunar Oasis: ESA Plans a Moon Base for Long-Term Science

0:00Stuart Gary This is space time series 29 episode

0:02 130 for broadcast on 30 October 2026. Coming up on Space Time, Europe's plans for an OASIS on the Moon. When they do start building cities on the moon, should you move there, we'll take a look at the issues and neutrinos holding clues to some of the universe's biggest secrets. All that and more coming up on, um, Space Time.

0:27Stuart Gary Welcome to Space Time with Stuart

0:30 G.

0:46Stuart Gary The European Space Agency is looking at

0:48 developing its own moon base, a facility that would supply energy, communications, data handling and logistics on the lunar surface. The Outpost for Advanced Scientific Investigation Station, or oasis, could provide scientists with an integrated infrastructure designed to survive the long cold 15 Earth Day lunar nights.

1:08 ESUS says the prolonged days of darkness and plummeting temperatures can severely damage electrical equipment without power or thermal protection to ride out the darkness. OASIS would replace the need for long duration payloads carrying their own complex systems for power and communications. It would collect solar energy during the lunar day, producing at least 75 watts of continuous power during daylight and 15 watts from banks of batteries during the lunar night. Along with communications, data hack handling and data storage. Detachable harness cable connections would feed payloads mounted on a lunar lander, as well as three separate deployable harnesses for payloads on the lunar surface. Scientists would simply plug

1:48 their experiments into Oasis, rather than each experiment needing its own life support system to survive the long night. This would allow scientific instruments to continue operating for years instead of just a single lunar day. Oasis could also include parking bays. Lunar rovers could be stored and recharged. And ESA's plans for the moon don't end there. They're also developing their own lunar lander called Argonaut, which would carry 1,500 kilogrammes of payload to the lunar south pole using the Ariane 64 booster. Italy's Thales Alenius Space is already building the lunar descent element. Current plans call for the first mission, Argonaut 1 to launch by the end of 2030, with follow up UH missions roughly every two to three years.

2:33 ESA is also developing its own constellation of lunar communications and navigation satellites called Project Moonlight. Moonlight would include one for high rate data communications, with the other four being for navigation. The first would launch in 2028 and the four constellations should be up and running by 2030. This is space time still to come.

2:54 When they do start building cities on the moon, should you move there, we'll take a look at the issues and neutrinos holding clues to the universe's biggest secrets. All that, and, uh, more still to come on spacetime. A new study warns that a self sustaining city on the moon Would likely fail after around a decade, with billionaires turning their focus to space. In recent years, two researchers have looked at how a proposed village or even a city on the moon would work, and whether there'd be enough natural resources there to sustain communities without having to bring water and power from earth. The authors found that while access to sunlight Makes sustainable power generation possible, there's only a finite amount of water

3:51 available, which means a small city Would likely run out of water after about a decade or so, Even if they were recycling their water as efficiently as on the international space station. The research shows that without recycling, A city of, say, a million people Would exhaust the entire estimated lunar water supply within about two years.

4:10 And with extreme 98% water recycling, which is similar to what happens on the international space station, the supply would only last roughly 100 years. And however, lower realistic estimates of lunar water Means even a small city could run out within a decade. The alternative would be a smaller, uh, moon village of about 1,000 people, which is comparable with research stations in Antarctica. The findings, reported in the journal frontiers in space technologies, Found that a smaller village or town of no more than a thousand people could be sustainable for centuries with carefree water use. This is space time still to come, neutrinos holding clues to the universe's biggest secrets. And later in the

4:50 science report, A new study warns that kids from socioeconomically disadvantaged families are, uh, more likely to have autism spectrum disorder. All that and more still to come on space time, Foreign. Two new experiments Involving ghostly particles called neutrinos could provide science with new clues about the evolution of our universe, Especially during its early days. Neutrinos are, uh, weakly interacting elemental particles Produced in things like the cores of stars, in nuclear reactors, in supernovae, and in atomic explosions.

5:37 They're so weakly interacting that there are millions of them Passing through you right now. They're called neutrinos because they have no electric charge, Only half spin, and almost no mass. That means they can travel at close to the speed of light. They're the most common particle with mass in the universe. Only the massless photon is more numerous. Neutrinos come in three basic types known as flavours. Electron, muon, and tau, each with its own antimatter counterpart. But one of the strangest qualities of these already strange elemental particles Is their ability to oscillate between flavours. So a neutrino which may have started its life in the sun's core as, say, a muon neutrino, could arrive at a

6:17 detector on Earth as an electron or tau neutrino. And because they travel unhindered across the cosmos, ultra high energy neutrinos give astronomers an unabsorbed direct window into high energy cosmic events like supernovae and black holes. Quantum models suggest that heavy decoupled neutrinos from the early universe may help explain why antimatter disappeared after the Big Bang, leaving behind a universe made mostly of normal matter. One of the study's authors, Zoya Villari from Ohio State University and the NUMMI Off Axis V appearance or NOVA experiment says understanding neutrinos can answer key questions about the evolution of the universe. In an effort to better understand the shape shifting behaviour of neutrino

7:02 oscillation, the NOVA experiment in the United States, together with the T2K experiment in Japan, have combined forces to shoot beams of neutrino particles over hundreds of kilometres, measuring how their flavours change throughout their journey. Despite having similar goals, the two experiments used very different neutrino uh energies and they studied the oscillations over different distances. NOVA sent a beam of muon neutrinos from the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Fermilab near Chicago to a detector in Ash River, Minnesota. And the T2K experiment sent their muon neutrinos from the east coast of Japan across the country to a detector in the mountains of western Japan. Valeri says

7:45 while both groups goals were the same, differences in experiment design adds more information when the data is all pooled together. While this new study, reported in the journal Nature, builds on previous work that found tiny but still very consequential differences in neutrino mass for each type, researchers are looking for deeper hints that neutrinos operate outside the standard laws of particle physics.

8:06 One such question is whether neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts behave differently, a phenomenon called charge parity violation. Neutrinos are a fascinating if difficult to study subject, and this look at the history of neutrinos with Dr. Don Lincoln from Fermilab. unfamiliar particles with names like quarks, which is not the sound that an Australian duck makes to bosons, which isn't a clown particle. Each have their respective personalities and behaviours. However, one of the particles is particularly curious.

8:39 This class of particles is called the neutrinos. Neutrinos are the ghosts of the subatomic world, they interact less than any of the other known particles, Even though we are constantly bombarded by them. In fact, something like 650 trillion of them Are hitting you every second. It took 30 years to prove that they exist at all. So let me tell you their story.

9:01 To start with, we need to go back to 1930, when they were first proposed. It turned out that there was a maddening little problem With a kind of radioactive decay called beta decay. Beta decay is when an atomic nucleus Emits an electron, and the nucleus changes from one element to another. This is kind of like the alchemist's dream of changing lead into gold. Although the actual elements were different at the time, the emitted electrons Were called beta particles, which is where the decay got its name. The problem was that when the energy of the original nucleus Was compared To the combined energy of the daughter nucleus and the electron, the books didn't balance. After the decay, energy was missing.

9:41 Since one of the most dearly held ideas of physics Is that energy can't be created or destroyed, the observation of the loss of energy in beta decay Sends the research world into a tizzy. Lots of ideas were considered, including the possibility that perhaps in the quantum world, that energy could disappear. In 1930, physicist Wolfgang Pauli Came up with the idea that the reason that the energy was missing Was that because there was an unobserved particle emitted in beta decay.

10:10 If that was true, the unobserved particle could carry away the energy, and the mystery was explained. These particles have come to be called neutrinos. There are four known forces. Two familiar ones Called gravity and electromagnetism, and two ones that aren't familiar, Called the strong and weak nuclear forces. Neutrinos do not interact with the strong and electromagnetic forces. We know that because if they did, they'd be very easy to see.

10:36 Neutrinos do experience the weak nuclear force and gravity. Of the two, the weak force is the stronger of the two by far. For all practical purposes, Neutrinos interact Only via the weak nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force is aptly named. To give you a sense of how weak it is, Let me give you an example. Neutrinos originate from nuclear reactions M and the biggest nuclear reactor around is the sun. The sun emits so many neutrinos that, even though that is about 93 million miles away, something like 650 trillion neutrinos from the sun Hit you every second.

11:12 So suppose you wanted to shield yourself from that steady barrage of neutrinos. How would you do that? Well, if you took a huge block of solid lead that extended from the nearest star, and I'm not talking about the Sun, I'm talking about Alpha Centauri, which is about 4, 5 light years away, you'd be able to block something like half the neutrinos from the Sun. If five light years of solid lead has such a poor shield, then there is no way you can stop them. Even if you use the entire Earth as your protection, most neutrinos blow right through the planet just like it's not even there. Neutrinos really don't interact very much.

11:47 So how did we detect them? Since neutrinos are emitted from nuclear interactions, one early idea was to put a neutrino detector near a nuclear detonation. However, that idea was quickly nixed as being, well, unnecessarily dramatic. So no bomb. Instead, in 1955, physicists put a neutrino detector near a nuclear power plant and basically turned the plant on and off, on.

12:10 And the detector saw more neutrinos off. And it saw less on and off, on and off. That's, uh, essentially all it took. In the last half century and more, neutrinos have been studied in great detail. There is no longer any question of their existence. We have observed them from many nuclear reactors and can even generate beams of them and shoot them hundreds of miles through the Earth to distant detectors. We have seen neutrinos that were created in distant supernovae.

12:35 We have even observed neutrinos emitted from the radioactive material inside the Earth. Neutrinos are now familiar denizens of the particle world. While the original idea of neutrinos supposed that there was only a single kind of neutrino, it turns out that there are actually three distinct variants.

12:51 One class of neutrino is associated with electrons and is called the electron type neutrino. The other two kinds of neutrinos are associated with cousins of the electron, the muon and the tau. Accordingly, these other types are called muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. Scientists use the lowercase Greek letter nuke to indicate a neutrino with a subscript to tell you what kind it is.

13:14 The way scientists discovered that there were three different kinds of neutrinos is that neutrinos seem to remember their origins. For instance, an experiment in 1962 created neutrinos in tandem with a muon. If one of those neutrinos was then collided into an atomic nucleus, only muons were generated in the Collision never electrons and never tau particles. The neutrino remembered how it was made. This observation led to a Nobel Prize in 1988 with the observation that neutrinos have distinct types. Scientists thought that they understood neutrinos reasonably well.

13:49 However, they continued to study them. In 1964, one scientist wanted to study neutrinos originated in the biggest nuclear reactor around the sun. Raymond Davis was a chemist by trade. He knew that neutrinos could interact with chlorine and make argon. He also knew that neutrinos interacted very weakly and he'd need a huge number of chlorine atoms to make it work. So he took a huge vat of perchloroethylene, which is just a scientific name for dry cleaning fluid. The vat contained 100,000 gallons of liquid. That's about the size of an Olympic sized swimming pool. He calculated that for every week of operation, that he could expect to create 10 atoms of argon.

14:32 Yeah, you heard me right. 10 atoms. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10. Now that number should have blown your mind. His vat contained about 9 million million million million million atoms of chlorine. And 10 of them should be converted to argon. This just sounds impossible. And yet it turned out that Davis could do just that. So what did he find? Well, it turns out that he didn't find the ten atoms he expected. He found only three. The easiest explanation was that either the prediction or the measurement was wrong. And yet many follow on experiments confirmed his results. He was detecting fewer neutrinos than expected.

15:13 This came to be called the solar neutrino deficit. Now, uh, you should be forgiven if you believe that somehow the entire field of neutrino physics made a huge mistake. However, another class of experiments told a similar tale. Another source of neutrinos came from cosmic rays, which is the constant pelting of high energy protons from the deepest space slamming into the atmosphere.

15:36 Because of how the cosmic rays interact, each electron type neutrino should be accompanied by two muon type neutrinos. While the solar neutrino deficit could have been due to improper measurement or calculation, it is very difficult to imagine how neutrinos from cosmic rays could occur in any, any ratio other than one electron type to two muon types. So what was measured?

15:58 Well, different experiments observed different results, but it was generally true that there were fewer muon neutrinos than expected. Another mystery had appeared, this one called the atmospheric neutrino problem. In the mid to late 1950s, Italian born physicist Bruno Pontecorvo hypothesised that it would be possible for the different flavours of neutrinos to oscillate into one another. If the idea was true, then a bunch of electron neutrinos could gradually morph into muon neutrinos and then back again to electron neutrinos. At the time he came up with the idea, only one kind of neutrino was known to exist. So his proposed oscillations were of neutrinos into their antimatter equivalents. However,

16:38 we now know that the right way to think about neutrino oscillations is between the three distinct types. The first compelling evidence for neutrino oscillations came in 1998 using the Super Kamiokande experiment in Japan. This detector is a huge underground cavern filled with 50,000 tons of water surrounded by detectors called phototubes. Rare neutrinos would interact in the water and give off a blink of light. Using that blink of light, you could identify the trajectory of the neutrino by separating it out. Neutrinos created the atmosphere directly above, which was about 12 miles away, from neutrinos created on the other side of the Earth, which was about 8,000 miles away.

17:19 They proved that it was the neutrinos that travelled a large distance that had changed their identity most. The snow experiment in a mine deep under Sudbury, Ontario, clinched it. Neutrinos were changing their identity. In the past decade, scientists have studied neutrino oscillation using beams of neutrinos made at particle physics laboratories. The Fermilab accelerator near Chicago, the CERN accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, and the KEK accelerator in Japan all fire beams of neutrinos through the Earth to targets hundreds of miles away.

17:51 These experiments have made tremendous headway in understanding the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation. However, there remain significant questions in the details of neutrino oscillations.

18:01Stuart Gary And in that report from the United States

18:03 Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator, we heard from Dr. Don Lincoln from Fermilab. This is space, time. And time. Now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with the Science report. A new study claims kids from socioeconomically disadvantaged and immigrant families are more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The findings reported in the Journal of the American Medical association are, uh, based on the Canadian study of over 2.3 million children born between 2002 and 2020. The authors found the rates of autism were highest in kids from the most socioeconomically disadvantaged, lowest income neighbourhoods and born to immigrant

18:58 mothers, and these differences worsened over time. Kids from these areas were also more likely to have been exposed to diabetes during their mother's pregnancy, as well as severe pregnancy complications and prematurity, which the authors may have contributed to these differences. A new study warns that many of the world's major cities are uh, sinking. The findings reported in the journal Nature are based on high resolution satellite data collected between 2014 and 2023 to measure land movement across 465 cities in 107 countries. The authors found that parts of Mexico City, Bandung in Indonesia and Isfahan in Iran were experiencing the most sinking. Their authors also looked at multiple cities across Australia, including

19:42 Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle and Perth, but found none of the Aussie cities came close to the likes of Mexico and Indonesia. A University of Melbourne led study has identified new insights and evidence that could help significantly mitigate the fast rising climate impact of lithium ion batteries. The study's modelling found that by 2050 demand for lithium ion batteries used in electric cars, vans, buses, trucks and battery energy storage systems could rise 20 fold, leading to a tenfold increase in their supply chain greenhouse gas emissions. The author's report in the journal One Earth also identified ways to reduce global lithium ion battery emissions on um, par with the annual

20:23 emissions of the European Union. A new study suggests that a man laid to rest in a Roman sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey isn't who he's supposed to be. In 1869 a skeleton was found inside the limestone sarcophagus which bore an inscription to Valerius Amandius, a wealthy Briton who lived in the city around the years 300 to 400.

20:45 However, the lid of the sarcophagus was carved with a Latin cross from the 10th or 11th century, leaving the true identity of the skeleton inside somewhat of a mystery now. A new analysis of the remains reported in the Journal of the British Archaeological association showed the deceased man was between 35 and 49 years old, around 5 foot 9 inches in height, with carbon dating of the bones suggesting that he lived between the years 987 and 1052.

21:12 Archaeologists working for Westminster Abbey believe the burns belonged to a high ranking mediaeval monk, Alweg, who was an abbot at the abbey and died around 1020 or possibly successor Woolnorth, who died in the year 1049. A psychologist has identified three mental triggers that may help explain many so called ghost encounters. Dr. Melissa Maffeo says pure research suggests some 18% of American adults Claim to have seen ghosts.

21:39 The sceptics. Timms Mendham says she stops short of declaring that ghosts aren't real, but lays out three specific factors that make some people far more prone to believe that they've encountered one.

21:49Tim Mendham You come down to a basic idea. Is our ghosts

21:51 real? And that might be an issue as well, where people see that there's a person who's coming up with particular ideas of what might influence people to believe that the ghost is real. The first one they suggest is that EMF machines, electromagnetic frequencies, are the machines that pick up to magnetic fields.

22:05 I think is the actual term, excuse me, that pick up signals from wherever and it goes click, click, click on your. On your. Little like a Geiger counter thing.

22:12Stuart Gary Yeah, we call them radios in my business.

22:15Tim Mendham Well, it has to have a dial that swings

22:17 around like a little all by itself. The answer, this person suggests is that these machines themselves are putting out frequencies which affects people's ability to assess a situation like infrasound, low sound, various sort of different types of sound frequencies that give people the sense of something, uneasiness, if you like, in an environment. And that therefore, rather than the machine reacting to a ghost presence, it's the machine is giving out a frequency that makes people think of ghosts. And certainly there are stories of interest, sound giving people sort of weird feelings, uh, unsure if you like. So yeah, maybe that is true. I don't know how effective that is.

22:53 Then there's the. What's called the brain's wiring, the ability to track what's in the body, what's outside the body called, uh, temporoparietal junction. Try and say that one quickly. And that basically allows you to track where our body ends and where the outside world begins. And it's saying if there's a glitch in that, you're having trouble sort of differentiating between you and what's out there in the environment. Now, uh, that might give you an eerie sense that someone or something is present. Because you can't really differentiate. Perhaps with you that's present, you can't really differentiate between the two. The third one that they suggest is a possible reason why some people see ghosts is personality.

23:26 Well, yeah, some people are more disposed towards believing in supernatural. The paranormal is for whatever reasons, societal, environmental, personal, mental, sort of whatever they have. And that some people are not. Well, you're starting off with that belief anyway. That idea that some people tend to want to believe and some people don't know necessarily want to believe. The level of evidence required, that's nothing particularly exciting about that. I mean, sure, there are probably a lot of reasons why people believe they see ghosts, and I think the personality is probably the the biggest one. Their inclination to believe is probably a really good, pretty good reason.

23:56Stuart Gary That's the sceptics. Tim Mendham and this is

23:58 Space Time. And that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through bytes.com, soundcloud, YouTube, your favourite podcast download provider, and from spacetimewithstuartgarry.com spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeartradio and TuneIn radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Space Time Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies or by becoming a Space Time patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show as well as lots of bonus audio content which doesn't go to air, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to

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25:01Stuart Gary You've been listening to Space Time with

25:03 Stuart Gary. This has been another quality podcast Production from bytes.com.