Paper Session II-C - Leo to Luna: Gathering New Information for the Establishment of a Permanent Presence in Space

What, exactly, can we learn from currently anticipated missions to low earth orbit (LEO) that can be successfully extrapolated with regard to a permanent human presence on (in) the moon? There are days when it seems appropriate to wonder if it is still acceptable to say “return to the moon” out loud. Nonetheless, there is a quiet movement toward a return to Lunar missions within the aerospace industry. Slowly, often without funding, regardless of public or sometimes even corporate support, engineers and technicians are diligently concentrating on the work which will make those missions possible. One example which comes to mind is the redesign of pressure suits — which takes into consideration the need to function in 1/6 in the presence of Lunar dust and shards of regolith. They are even referred to, when no one is listening, as “moon suits”

Paper Session II-C - Redesigning the 2nd Stage Lunar Exploration/ Settlement Team

What will it take to not only get back on track with human exploration of space, but with its settlement as well? Is this a goal which can be accomplished to any significant extent during our own lifetimes? This paper makes specific recommendations about the possibility of such an accomplishment, re-considers the conventional recommendations for an infrastructure to support lunar exploration, and argues for several changes in the program as it is generally proposed. Even with the great new information coming in from the Clementine mission, we have scarcely begun to develop a real program which will actually allow us to develop a permanently inhabited facility. A whole collection of U.S. and Soviet unmanned explorers, mappers, and probes, supplemented by the Apollo program, have provided us with literal tons of information. We have an ever-growing collection of information about lunar geology (selenology), terrain, radiation exposure and other environmental issues. We have concepts and, in some cases, plans, for habitats on lunar orbit and on and within the Moon itself In various nations around the world, there exist detailed studies of construction techniques adapted to 1/6G, factory concepts and plans, mining recommendations for the collection of Helium 3 and endless amounts of speculation about everything from the possibility of diamonds to evidence of former habitation on the moon. Despite all that, there are no funded programs for the return of human beings and the establishment of a permanent facility on-the Moon

Project Thetis

The most prevalent pollutant in beachfront ecosystems is microplastic. Microplastics are the broken-down remains of discarded plastic products that are less than 5mm in diameter, and they can be found in large numbers in the top three inches of sand. Animals that inhabit burrows in the sand, as well as sea life, are affected by this plastic due to accidental ingestion. Project Thetis is constructing an autonomous robot that is capable of driving over the dry sand on the beach to collect these microplastics. We will prioritize the preservation of the ecosystems we involve ourselves in, so the robot will have as little impact on the topography of the sand as possible. The methodology for achieving our goals is to separate sand and plastics based on their unique terminal velocities. Sand has a lower terminal velocity than the average microplastic, so the air will be moving at a higher velocity than the sand carrying it upward. The velocity of the air will in turn also be less than the terminal velocity of microplastics, allowing the microplastics to fall into a collection bin. Future goals for the project involve utilizing the microplastics collected to make 3D printing filament to reuse material and prevent it from reverting back to what it is currently: microplastic

Post-fledging movements, mortality and migration of juvenile northern gannets

Studying the at-sea movements and behaviour of juvenile seabirds is logistically challenging, but new technologies now allow tracking birds on their first migration, giving a more complete picture of population-level spatial ecology. We investigated the post-fledging migration of juvenile northern gannets Morus bassanus from the world's largest colony, at Bass Rock, Scotland. We first examined the movements and survival of 38 juveniles over their initial days at sea with GPS precision for up to 53 d post-fledging. We then compared their migration journeys with those of 35 adults tracked with geolocators. Almost one-third of juveniles died within 2 mo of leaving the colony, and this mortality was often associated with apparent uncertainties in their direction of migration, including marked, abrupt and often repeated changes in bearing within the North Sea. Both juveniles and adults then migrated as far as the Canary Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) off the Atlantic coast of West Africa, initially taking both clockwise and counter-clockwise routes around the UK. Juveniles covered a distance each day similar to that of adults, but they reached the CCLME much more quickly, mainly because they travelled more directly, staying close to the coast throughout most of their migration, whereas adults additionally spent long periods over relatively restricted areas of ocean further offshore. The CCLME is a hotspot of unregulated fishing activity, and our findings highlight the importance of this region across different age-classes of birds, echoing previous calls that the regional strengthening of marine conservation should be a high priority

HPAIV outbreak triggers short-term colony connectivity in a seabird metapopulation

Disease outbreaks can drastically disturb the environment of surviving animals, but the behavioural, ecological, and epidemiological consequences of disease-driven disturbance are poorly understood. Here, we show that an outbreak of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza Virus (HPAIV) coincided with unprecedented short-term behavioural changes in Northern gannets (Morus bassanus). Breeding gannets show characteristically strong fidelity to their nest sites and foraging areas (2015–2019; n = 120), but during the 2022 HPAIV outbreak, GPS-tagged gannets instigated long-distance movements beyond well-documented previous ranges and the first ever recorded visits of GPS-tagged adults to other gannet breeding colonies. Our findings suggest that the HPAIV outbreak triggered changes in space use patterns of exposed individuals that amplified the epidemiological connectivity among colonies and may generate super-spreader events that accelerate disease transmission across the metapopulation. Such self-propagating transmission from and towards high density animal aggregations may explain the unexpectedly rapid pan-European spread of HPAIV in the gannet

Policy implications of a permanenet US presence on moon

M.S.Richard Bark