Technology-Enabled Human Exploration of the Moon

As our species contemplates a new wave of human exploration of the Moon, the time is right for an objective look at the principles and protocols that guided the Apollo scientific program. Thus informed, we will be positioned well to design new and improved strategies with even greater scientific returns. The landscape of lunar exploration in this century will be very different from that in the last century, influenced by nearly four decades of technological innovation since Apollo. While we have not yet developed reliable, autonomous or semi-autonomous, mobile robotic systems that do field geology here on Earth, it stands to reason that simple, expendable instruments of that kind would be a tremendous boon to lunar surface studies. Such instruments need not be overly sophisticated, but they must be rugged and capable of operating over a wide range of environmental conditions. Most importantly, they must increase the scientific efficiency of the astronaut crews, not detract from it. (Those of us who are veterans of teaching field geology using handheld computers for data archiving can testify to the seductions of the digital world!) In this talk, I will review those characteristics of the human computational system that make us, for now, uniquely qualified as field geologists. We are, for example, much better than robots at extracting critical information from broadband observations and at changing observational strategies in order to maximize the science return. I will also review the advantages of non-biological sensor systems. Such systems are far more reliable observers of the surrounding environment than humans are and, for the most part, far less fragile. The key to getting the most science from lunar expeditions in the future will to delegate responsibilities effectively among a team of human and non-human explorers.