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NASA Plans Robotic Lunar Scouts
bleckywelcky writes "NASA's plan to send robotic scouts to the moon in advance of astronauts is starting to take shape, but politics and the presidential election are stalling progress. Yet, NASA is already designing the first of the robotic explorers. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter would return a global topographical map of the moon, measure deep space radiation in lunar orbit and attempt to find water ice at the lunar poles. Read the whole story."
Sure sure, and next thing you know they'll tell you they'll send a man on the moon. Sheesh...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The Mars rovers continue to do an amazing job. Send in the robots!
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Ummm... isn't this a bit backwards? First send men, wait 30 years then send robots?
Will they get special moon badges?
Send Arnie back for another look.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q =cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmarsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov%2Fho me%2Findex.html&btnG=Google+Search&meta
They're going to send Al Gore.
The year 2000 called and wants its joke back.
Since NASA, with Lockheed and Boeing, is spending a fair amount of money on developing radio-thermo generator for the Martian surface laboratory, in addition to the chassis, it would seem to make sense to attempt to share the technology (and associated costs) between the two missions. This could save some money and give NASA more long term experience in developing, using, and maintaining standardized systems. I'm sure some of the instruments could be useful. For example, I don't know about current plans, but there had been talk of equipping a Martian mission, I think the sample return, with a drill for taking a deep subsurface core sample, with hopes of finding a permafrost layer. I expect it could be adapted fairly easily to be used on the lunar surface as well.
Hell, they couldn't find the remains of my land rover last time I left it parked in south central, so nevermind on the moon...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Leave it to the private companies, they've given ample evidence of capability superior to NASA's
Some dude flying a light aircraft at 360,000 ft for several seconds in 2004 doesn't even remotely qualify as proving superior to NASA's putting tons of men and equipment on another planet and bringing back many pounds of samples back on earth in 1969, sorry.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well that's cool. It's a lot less expensive to send robots than it is to send people. They'll do more science. It'd be really cool if the robots could manipulate objects and construct a green house or a solar array or a water generating plant to sotre resources for future visits.
Does the lunar soil have nutrients for plant life or would we have to send it up too?
Stuff that matters.
I wonder if it will look like this
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Was wondering what kind of kilts the robots would have.
Just what is the ratio of success-to-failures that you are so tired of?
I love how everyone reads the negative headlines. The failures get much more attention than the successes.
So, why dont you stop reading slashdot, jumping to conclusions and get to work showing NASA how it really can be done!
The whole return to the moon project and perhaps all of nasa's jobs should be outsourced to Burt Rutan.
OBLIG. FUTURAMA:
He IS the first Emperor of the moon... and besides. He has rode the Moon Worm!
...going to do a surface magnetic scan to look for the Monolith?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
... not really.
.... ummm ... five minutes?
1. Fork out an obscene amount of money to get men to the moon.
2. Spend 30 years getting increasingly pissed of while watching the tinfoil hat crowd trying to prove those men were never there.
3. Get fed up with it and send in the robots to prove them wrong.
Of course we all know that even if NASA does take the time to drive a moonrover righ up to some of the equipment left on the moon by the Apollo expeditions and filmed the stuff those crackpots will still go on claiming the whole thing is staged. But it would be fun to see how long it takes them to come up with a new theory, I'm predicting
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
But everyone else beat me to it.
from the Lunar Prospector team. They flew a robotic craft around the moon for 19 months and collected detailed surface data all for a cost of only $65 million. Some say this was NASA's most cost effective mission ever. It originally met opposition because no one believed it could be done that cheap. But despite the low price tag, the data it produced was 10 times better than expected.
"They can put a man on the moon, but they can't... uhh... put a man on the moon."
No private company is going to spend billions of dollars to send spacecraft into the solar system and beyond so that we can answer some basic questions in science. Ofcourse if you think that research into basic sciences is a waste of money than there is no argument. No private company or individual will invest in anything until they are convinced that they can make a few bucks for every buck they invest. And you must provide some evidence for which private company has superior capability than nasa for space right now. Infact a number of screwups that nasa had have been due to mistakes in manufacturing by these very private companies that you talk of.
And your cost estimate is waaay off. While NASA as a whole gets about $15 billion a year, the Genesis mission had a total cost to NASA of about $216 million, spread over several years for design, development, launch, and operations. You were two orders of magnitude wrong: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/genesis.html
And really, Space Ship One had problems on its first flight. Just check out http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/21/suborbita l.test/
It's just lucky that the problems weren't such that they would be fatal. After all, who would expect that a cold day could blow up a Space Shuttle? Or that a piece of foam the size of a backpack would cause another to disintegrate, when dozens of pieces of foam usually strike the leading edge of the wing?
Your comment actually shows that you don't know how complex spacecraft are. Take a look at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/index.cfm
Consider how bad the radiation environment of space is. Without a magnetosphere to guard it, a spacecraft has to take the full brunt of the radiation put out by the sun, as well as any quasars, pulsars, black holes, and other sources. It's not like you can go buy a radiation hardened computer at your local Best Buy.
So, really, you might be tired of NASA, but nobody, and I mean NOBODY but NASA could have made the two Mars rovers, put them on Mars, and kept them functioning as long as they have.
You might be tired of NASA, but we are only just now beginning to understand how the solar system formed, and the Cassini probe is a large part of why we might be able to figure it out.
You might be tired of NASA, but I'm not.
If there is a Kerry win expect the Bush space initiative to be scrapped. Then it will be back to full operation of the shuttle again. ( Bush tried to kill shuttle )
Alas, every new president means a rearrangement of the deck chairs.
No no, Gore only invented lunar robot scouts. Now he's designing the lunar robot superhighway.
"NASA's plan to send robotic scouts to the moon in advance of astronauts is starting to take shape, but politics and the presidential election are stalling progress."
Translation: Kerry has indicated, if elected, he will kill the new moon and mars exploration agenda to pay for increased social spending. So we won't know until after the votes have been counted whether moon exploration is a go.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Interesting that the Soviets were able to land probes and get rocks and film back to earth without needing people.
Maybe their automated technology was more reliable. But there definitely was a political motive at NASA. Sending people to the moon and making national heros out of the astronouts was a great way of keeping the focus off Vietnam.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We already found out thirty some years ago that the moon infact, was not made of cheese. Why go back?!
I am so very tired of NASA. They may have accomplished some amazing feats, but they screw up so many things (sensors upside down, feet not meters, bad insulation, etc), and every time someone there miscalculates, BAM! there goes $10 billion of misappropriated taxpayer money.
I rather spend 10 billion in the space program than 120 billion in a stupid war in the Middle East.
> It's just lucky that the problems weren't such that they would be fatal. After all, who would expect that a cold day could blow up a Space Shuttle? Or that a piece of foam the size of a backpack would cause another to disintegrate, when dozens of pieces of foam usually strike the leading edge of the wing?
You're thinking of the shuttle management team; the engineers who were involved with the affected subsystems knew very, very well what could happen, and tried to prevent it. Management chose to ignore warnings. NeedAnotherSevenAstronauts resulted.
The Russian space program sent the Lunokhod 1 rover to the moon in 1970 and Lunakhod 2 in 1973. Lunakhod 1 lived 8 months, moved over 10.5 km, and returned 20,000 pictures. Lunakhod 2 operated 4 months, moved 37 km, and returned 80,000 pictures.
This actually makes a lot of sense. The robots can do a lot of scouting ahead of time so that when we do send people back to the moon we can cut out the areas we are sure are of no interest. There are still a lot of things that humans can do that remote controlled robots can't though. At least using robots we can eliminate one of the problems we had with the original Lunar Landing. The original site was too rocky and they had to move over a bit (and wasted fuel) trying to get to a "smooth" landing point. With robots we can get more detailed maps and set down precise landing areas. This will save trouble later on.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
From TFA: "Budget constraints The fledgling program is facing severe cuts in Congress." Why don't they send CP3O with a dowsing rod!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Rover this and robot that; we sent a man to the moon in the 60's why cant we just send one now. It would be a lot more interesting.
Politics + Science = BS
oh it was when they sent a rover to mars. So all theyre adding are some beefy metal arms and cool terminator2 style optics and delay touching the moon for yet another 10-15 years. Looking at the moon can easily be done with some modded mars rovers, which is a much cheaper and easier way than creating all new robots. (IMHO) they should think about space travel(even outside our solar system) more than the moon. Its interesting, but the galaxy has so much more to offer.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
I am so very tired of NASA. They may have accomplished some amazing feats, but they screw up so many things (sensors upside down, feet not meters, bad insulation, etc), and every time someone there miscalculates, BAM! there goes $10 billion of misappropriated taxpayer money. I rather spend 10 billion in the space program than 120 billion in a stupid war in the Middle East. The point is that NASA doesn't have to spend so much money.
NASA is funded by the government. Everything they produce is therefore built to government specification. Ever hear the one about an elephant being a mouse built to government specifications?
So we get ten robots on the moon, when for the same price you could drop 1000 RC vehicles with webcams.
The ranger series of robots paved the way for Neil and Buzz.
they flew between 1961 and 1965
The ranger series of missions were pretty crude. they were cameras on legs which were mostly designed to test the radio controlled retro rocket system for a safe landing... heck the earliest rangers were actually tasked with hitting the moon at any speed to see if it could be done.
The future robots are many, many orders of magnitude more sophisticated, and will work to establishing an infrastructure (better maps, other needful things) for future astronauts, rather than just seeing if it is possible to go there.
Hey, I don't think the article gave us many details about these robots. Will they be autonamous in the sense of doing their own navigation and such (like the robots in that contest out the desrt earlier this year), or will they be entirely controlled from earth?
...anybody know more about these robots?
I suppose, with the moon only be a quarter million miles from the earth, a one-to-two second time delay in controlling the robot may not be worth the expense of putting in fancy on-board AI, but
With recent military space intereest, will these claim the (possibly) 3 PSLs on the moon? These are of major strategic value so I am surprised there has been so little discussions of them.
it could be done that cheap
"cheaply".
I doubt that they would find water at the lunar poles. Man.. there is no atmosphere on the moon.
Low gravity. if it was ever theere it would have escaped into outer space by now.
So, when do they plan to send the teleoperated bulldozers and other construction equipment? Our Guys will need somewhere to stay below the lunra surface to avoid excessive radiation doses, so they'll want a lunar base that's ready for occupancy when they arrive.
Why aren't they working with Caterpillar and John Deere on this?
Chip H.
If you're smart enough to use a Google cache link, how can you not know how to properly format the link?
How you get a +5 moderation without embedding your links is beyond me...
Do they need little robot merit badges?
Do they sell cookies to Web sites?
Is there a robot Scoutmaster?
Watch out for that probe!
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
I don't know how! I've never used HTML before about a month ago and I've only ever used it for /.! :) Sorry!
The question is, though, can a smaller company avoid these problems? To some extent, yes it can. The managers are closer to the engineers and can communicate more directly.
Another problem, though, is "go fever," much of the problem with Challenger was the strong desire to launch. I don't think that any company, regardless of size, is immune to this--just look at what happened with one of the powered flights of SpaceShipOne, where the nav computer winked out during the main rocket engine burn. The pilot should have cancelled the burn immediately, but he pushed it and was successful. Luckily the computer came back on when the burn finished, but still! (This came from watching the documentary "Black Sky", by the way, so I don't have a link. Sorry.)
So, despite engineering usually knowing what the problem is, we're still dealing with fantastically complex machines that, when something goes wrong, there are large consequences. And we'll always have managers making decisions who understand the problems only partially. So I'm still glad that NASA is around, even if they (understandably) sometimes mess up. This IS rocket science. :)