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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
Ummm... isn't this a bit backwards? First send men, wait 30 years then send robots?
Will they get special moon badges?
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
I read the title as "NASA Plans Robotic Lunar Scots"
Was wondering what kind of kilts the robots would have.
And here folks, we have a perfect example of method #34 of getting a +1:Funny rating on Slashdot. Let's detail a generic recipe for this method:
1 - Quickly peruse the blurb, lift a sentence out of it
2 - Quote the sentence in your post, pretend you read something else, presumably funny, by changing whatever word you want to anything you want.
3 - Make some witty comment about what you supposedly thought, or wondered, or believed, by supposedly mis-reading the sentence.
4 - Don't forget to indicate, somewhere in your post or in the title, that you're tired, you need coffee or you generally need rest, to explain why you would mis-read the sentence in the first place
Voilà, no need to find a genuine sentence that's funny, just make up your own with some context and watch yourself be modded up!
That, people, concludes the Slashdot lesson for the day...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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.