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."

Comments

Keep the politicians and the robots happy

[Timesprout]

Send Arnie back for another look.

Outsource it

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole return to the moon project and perhaps all of nasa's jobs should be outsourced to Burt Rutan.

NASA should take a lesson on these mission types

[ravenspear]

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.

Re:Green Cheese Mining

[Carnildo]

Does the lunar soil have nutrients for plant life or would we have to send it up too?

No nutrients. Lunar regolith is only good for providing structure; anything else would need to be sent up.

(Nitpick: the stuff on the Moon is regolith -- powdered rock. Soil has significant amounts of organic content as well.)

35 years behind the Russians

[peter303]

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.

Re:why wasnt this thought of...

[some guy I know]

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.

They'd have to be modded more than you may think.
For example, since the Moon is (effectively) airless, the craft can't use aerobraking and parachutes to help it land.
Also, the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-half that on the surface of Mars, so bits of the structure will be shaved off to take advantage of this and to save weight.
In addition, since there is no effective Lunar atmosphere, any air-sampling instrumentation will be useless.
Finally, because the Moon rotates more slowly than Mars, a Lunar rover will spend about 14 days in darkness, so it can't use solar cells for power/recharge unless it wants to be inactive half the time.
The long Lunar day also means that the temperature range that the rover must endure is much higher than that on Mars.

By the time all of this is taken into account, it would probably be better to design a Lunar rover from scratch, using the experience gained from the Martian rovers (and other sources), than it would be to modifiy a Martian rover to perform on the Moon.