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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
Fuck this.. just release Duke Nukem Forever, 3dRealms!
Check out the Lunar Surface! Should be familiar to most /. readers.
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
rooooboooots from oooooouter space overlords are welcome in my tiny abode.
They're going to send Al Gore.
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hopefully this will settle the man-never-went-to-the-moon controversy.
In a surprising upset, Peace and Justice nominee Ralph Nader has just secured the White House. Apparently the majority of voters were too embarassed to announce their support of a 3rd party candidate within circles of their peers, to preliminary pollers, to exit pollers, to their spouses, children, coworkers...
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.
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. Leave it to the private companies, they've given ample evidence of capability superior to NASA's.
...to go vote for John F. Kerry, you cock-smoking teabaggers.
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.
The whole return to the moon project and perhaps all of nasa's jobs should be outsourced to Burt Rutan.
...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.
What I don't understand is why they need to design anything.
My understanding is that they use really old proven equipment anyway (like 386 and 486 processors).
Why haven't these robots already been designed?
How many chunks of rock similar to the moon are there? Lots-- like the whole astroid belt, a few other earth satellites, Mars, comets...
Why not design *a* robot and make a bunch of them for real cheap, then just start spraying them into space?
And as for pre-astronaut moon stuff... We've been there before... make more of that and throw about 30 times more than we think we'll need along with whatever (minimum of) new-fangled stuff they want before they even think about putting a human up there. That stuff is going to break-- it would be nice for the astronauts to have the luxury of backup upon backup upon backup before they have to splicing and welding for their lives (apparently the Russian strategy).
Why does NASA have to do a one-off for every freaking nut and bolt?
Yeah-- I know it costs a lot to launch something-- but I bet it also costs a lot to design a new spacecraft every time we launch. And yes I know this is simplified and exaggerated-- but by how much?
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."
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.
"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 don't want my son sleeping in a tent with no gay moon creatures.
vote bush!
Scouting prohibits the practice of robo-sexuality!
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
ofo8e single puny Smith only serve The aacounting
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
same year, BSD centralized
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?
Do they need little robot merit badges?
Do they sell cookies to Web sites?
Is there a robot Scoutmaster?
Watch out for that probe!
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