New moon exhibit makes scents of space exploration

From TheStar.com (Canada): New moon exhibit makes scents of space exploration
What does moondust smell like?

Spent gunpowder, says Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, who looked more like a coal miner than a space explorer after a moonwalk.

Four-day-old socks, says Michael Shara, who has created the exhibit that lets Earthlings get a whiff of the moon.

Shara, the Montreal-born and Toronto-educated director of astrophysics at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, built the new Beyond Planet Earth exhibit as a forward-thinking exploration in which the moon plays the role of next-door neighbour.

“I wanted to look at the next 50 or 100 or 300 years,” he told the Star.

“People have become extraordinarily blasé about things like the shuttle,” he said. “In large measure that attitude is well placed. But going over that is not the way to excite schoolchildren.”

So lunar mining and even tourism is a given, a jumping-off point for travel first to a nearby asteroid and then Mars and then Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and finally the Earthlike exoplanets orbiting other stars.

Will we be colonizing the moon in 50 years? “I would be surprised if we’re not.”

Helium 3, a vital element in nuclear energy, is rare on Earth but “relatively abundant” on the moon and “could be the thing that drives us to the moon and keeps us there.”

Or it could be tourism, via a lunar elevator rather than rockets. Shara himself figures he has a “50-50 chance” of at least getting to orbit the moon, but his children will land there.

The smell of moon dust, recreated by chemists synthesizing compounds, is among the interactive exhibits that attempt to recreate life on other worlds.

Despite “carte blanche” in the creation, Shara admitted he had to rein in his imagination.

“I would have preferred an even more immersive experience in Mars —a real lava field that people could walk through. But then we’d have a lawsuit on our hands if anyone fell in.”

The lunar liquid mirror telescope couldn’t use mercury because of its toxicity. “Everything has to be safe from the prying hands of kids.”