Category: Whipple Crater Mine

Peary Station was the first permanently occupied base at the Lunar north pole, and the scientists there keep busy looking up and down at the same time.  Peary Crater was chosen because it’s the oldest, largest crater near the pole, making it perfect for the study of deep ice cores to reveal the solar system’s…

Had an alarm this morning, while Kate and I were off duty at the hab. The dual-auger hit a weak point and sank through what must have been a hard but thin layer of icy regolith. Our survey data didn’t reflect any such thing, and the geology experts didn’t predict a cavity like that. So…

Liftoff! Actually, I’ve forgotten how many tankers we’ve launched already, but it always looks and feels like the first. Not as spectacular as an Earth launch, since the gravity is low. But you hear and feel it through your feet, the dust flies, and the huge thing hovers up and ignites its main engines. This…

I had to call Eddie and Yukito in from their solar array inspection run.  Needed them to solve a power problem. Totally my fault.  Diana and Al were busy with launch prep. Stepan and Kate were asleep.  I was trying to get a jump on water purification system maintenance, and my tools were kind of…

Behind the crater wall, always in shadow, sits the cracking station, where dump trucks bring raw ice and regolith and drop it into machines that crush and heat the material. The water evaporates, and it is captured in a condenser. The leftover regolith gets pushed over the cliff and builds up like a giant landfill,…

Every week we launch a full DTVL-91 Mustang tanker with a capacity of 91 tons. It burns about 27 tons to get to Gateway, delivers 36 tons, and burns the remaining 27 tons to get back safely. So over our 6-month tour, we’ll need to fit in two extra deliveries. Al came along because he…

Micrometeorites did a little damage to the main solar array that powers the cracking station.  Yukito and I took the CEHV out to install replacement panels. Most of the micrometeorites are too small to cause much damage, but some are big enough to tear through several layers of the photovoltaic film. We do visual inspections…

We live in an installation at the rim of Whipple Crater, originally used as a space agency science station – when I was just a kid. OPAL took over from the first mining operation a few years back. Our solar panels are efficient enough to cover our daily needs while storing enough energy, in big…

I sent my status report to OPAL, letting them know that Kate’s find should produce up to 300 tons of propellant. Mac spotted the yellow flag from an older crew. It might have been a Chinese firm… just extra confirmation that we’re really onto something. Eddie’s in charge of the tomato project, a subcontracted experiment…

The satellites had a few new sites lined up for us based on [tooltip term=”polarization” tip=”Ice is transparent to radar at a wavelength of 12.6 cm, and imperfections in the ice can scatter the radar in a way that hard, rocky, reflective surfaces will not. The circular polarization ratio can indicate the presence of water…

It’s also the last load for this site. Kate will be heading out to search for a new ice pocket tomorrow morning. Yukito came out here with me today to check the systems on all our robotic equipment before we move them to the new site. We use the buddy system when leaving the habitat, just…

I can tell the First Crew had an easy time of it. The top meter of the surface, here, is 0.8% ice (by mass), 0.9% in some places. We can mine this down to 0.1%, below which it’s usually not worth it. We keep our methods as simple as possible, many borrowed from mining on…

So this time the customer wants 1,000 tons of propellant delivered to Gateway over the next six months. Problem is, the first crew used up all the good nearby ice. We get to clean up what’s left and go farther out onto the crater floor. Half of our equipment needs maintenance, which the first crew says…