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Ion Rocket to Map Moon with X-Rays
jralls writes "The Guardian is reporting that a European ion-rocket has taken the last year to reach the moon and is about to enter lunar orbit. Once it slows and gets into a very low orbit, it will probe the surface with x-rays in an effort to solve the long standing puzzle of the moon's origin."
I wonder if we are able to observe this interplanetary tortoise from earth? If it passes the bright side in full moon, we should have quite a clear view of it since it's going so slowly.
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Place your bets!
I say the moon came from Uranus, what do you say? Here take a survey!
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Uranus
Another Galaxy
Mars-sized planet crashed into the earth
Comet
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Another Dimension
It was a spaceship!
Cowboy Neal
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I expected the story to read "But when Flash Gordon approaches, will the moon people fight back with their electro-guns? Watch next week to find out!"
A trip to the moon took something like a few weeks in 60s and 70s!
Is Europe now going to take the lead in space exploration?
From the article :
"The sun emits X-rays and these are reflected back into space by atoms on the Moon's surface. A magnesium atom will reflect an X-ray in a different way from an iron atom, and Grande's detector can detect these differences.
Flying over the lunar poles, so that it covers the entire Moon as it revolves below, Smart will create strip maps of the surface - and eventually a global map of its composition."
Look like useful data to me if we were in the 'mine the moon' business... maybe in a not so distant future?
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I keep hearing that Ion propulsion is faster than what we currently use. What's with the incredibly slow travel time?
Anyone still using film up there is going to be pissed when their exposures are ruined.
Everyone learns that the moon is made of cheese in the cartoons. I bet they'll say it's from Wisconsin.
-- No sig for you!
Finally we can have proofs that the moon is made out of cheese..
I do hope it's cheddar..
Unfortunately, when this rocket left earth a decade ago, digital photography wasn't around so they were forced to use 35mm film onboard to map the surface. This means we will have to wait for the rocket to make its 20 year return to earth before seeing any results.
(yes I know they don't use 35mm film or your typical kodak digital camera on these space vehicles, so don't bother telling me)
Will these guys be able to snag some good shots of the trash we left on the moon? Exluding the flag of course, which can't be trash cuz its on a stick.
Jeoin
"Come to the moon and smell our dairy air!"
Doesn't quite have the same ring...
Isn't that the way the monolith will be found?
...to fund x-raying Uranus. Even less for Cowboy Neal's Uranus.
if you know what the trash looks like on x-ray, then you could try searching for it... I think they are more interested in the rocks below the trash tho, so the camera's are probably designed to see that and not the surface (with the trash).
All indicators show that the human race is selectively breeding itself for stupidity.
sobering thought that that headline sounds exactly like something you might hear in a pulp sci-fi movie from the 50's...
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
uh... since when is Sept. 2003 a decade ago?
also....we had probes in the 60s that didn't have to "return" to earth to send back pictures
I'm hoping this Ion drive driven S.M.A.R.T 1 will do interesting things like find those elusive water deposits, map the small unchartered areas of the far side (I bet theres still some) and even try and locate the Apollo landers.
The last one will be the coolest for obvious reasons, the first one would be the most profound, for the proposed colony, and the second one, a fuller, completer map of the moon for the future explorers on the surface. It wouldn't surprise me though if a GPS system was set up by then anyway.
Back on subject, this should showcase the usefulness of Ion drives, and prove their application as a propulsion method for little 'inner system' trips like this. (Ion drives were already proven with Deep Space 1 for inter-system propulsion) I doubt they will get used for human ships though, too slow.
Doesn't this mean earth should have some huge dent in it, and not be so round? Look at the sizes of Mars and Earth. Are you surprised earth is still here after a crash of that magnitude? I am. Maybe earth was a lot bigger before a Mars-like planet destroyed itself crashing into earth, but then I go back to my question about the roundness of the earth.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable wants to talk about that. The article doesn't go into any great detail on that, which causes a lot of questions to be raised.
Free X-rays for all Moon residents. Take that Canada!
Learn About Outsourcing. http://www.pioutsource.com
that it is not the whole moon. There are areas that light, and x-rays do not reach. Sadly, that is the most inteesting as it may contain ice.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Everyone knows it's made of Pepper Jack.
You know why the British don't build computers, right?
They haven't figured out how to make them leak oil yet...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
....what happened when they probed Mars with X-rays! Watchout! (is Gary Sinise piloting?)
Figures, people are going to talk about going to Mars and how long it's going to take to get there etc, and here we have a perfectly good place to practice, the moon, it's been there, forever, and we still don't know jack about it. Does not give me much faith in the space program to think that we are talking about space stations and other galaxies when we don't know what we're doing with the rock right next to us, and it's not NASA, it's Europe! The US space program really needs to shape up.
- Saturn SL1-WNY - Propz: GNAA
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The mountains on Earth may appear huge to us insects on the surface, but from a distance the earth appears as smooth as a billiard ball.
Ironically this event was so big, that unlike latter smaller hits, all evidence in the way of dents will be gone as the entire globe virtually liquefied and coalesced again. Though I wouldn't rule out some exotic mass distributions that might lend evidence of it.
Letter To Iran
The Moon is a liberal myth!
We just _have_ to make sure there's no life there, right?
The first ion-powered spacecraft, Deep Space 1, was launched in 1998 by NASA. That's a lead of 5 years.
News at eleven.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
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At each pole, there are such deep caverans that sun never reaches it. That includes X-rays and normal sun light. That is why it is possible for ice to be there. And yes, it is considered part of the surface.
Maybe it was by some metric, but it sure as hell indicates a low acceptance threshold for comedy.
The info pointed here is absolutely factual. These mods are way off base. Go get them.
Q: Why do the British drink warm beer? A: Because Lucas makes their refrigerators.
"Who's going to believe a talking head?" - Herbert West
Posted by CmdrTaco on 01:06 AM -- Monday November 08 2004
:-P
from the dept.
I've always read the 'from the so and so and whatever dept' cuz it's humourously funny and cynic at the same time.
This time, it's just plain ol' from the dept. I just wonder, whether it is an oversight or CmdrTaco really does not have anything witty to say about it?
I know, I know it is off-topic, mod me down then.. I probably deserve it.
Will sys-admin for food
Ion drive technology allows you to explore space in ways that chemical rockets simply can't.
Quoting from the article,
"We have shown that even a small ion engine like Smart's can get us across space. Now we are planning to build space telescopes and robot probes to planets such as Mercury, using bigger and more powerful ion engines. These will take years off space-travel times. Instead of decades-long missions, we will take only a couple of years to cross space for future projects."
But,
"Ion engines need electricity and only solar panels can provide enough at present. So ion engine missions will be restricted to planets and moons near the Sun."
So the solution to deep space exploration is nuclear-powered ion-drives and NASA is working on it.
Jr V.O.: Everything was ready to put together the Moon Cycle, except the engine. But without the engine we just won't have it ready in time for Daytona.
Sr: Where the $%^& is the engine?!
Vinny: Last I heard it was in orbit.
Sr: MIKEEEEYYYY!!!
I seem to remember every parking space in every car park I've seen in America had a slick of leaked engine oil in the centre of it, not a common sight over here in the UK!
Look up any reasonable book on mechanics and you will find a formula for the final velocity of rockets that have a empty mass M, mass of fuel m, and have an exhaust velocity v. The final velocity of the vehicle is ...
In other words ion rockets will beat chemical rockets because they eject their exhaust at a reasonable fraction of c, whereas chemical rockets have exhaust velocities more like velocities we see on earth (e.g. bullets). So chemical rockets need lots of mass, but that's ok because they throw out lots of mass. Trouble getting to space is expensive ... each kilo of fuel you put in orbit better be wisely used ... so in space ion rockets make sense (apart from the fact you can't use them on Earth anyway ... wouldn't be able to lift off even).
Hope this makes things a bit clearer.
Bitter and proud of it.
Ion engines become more efficient the longer the distance travelled. The short hop to the moon may take longer with a 'slow' ion engine, but going to, say, Alpha-Centauri would allow enough time for that same little ion engine to appraoch a signifigant percentage of c. It would take more chemical fuel than the earth could provide to approach that (assuming you had to carry all that fuel with you).
Hypothesis: mars is red. Send probe, take snaps. Yup it's red.
Hypothesis: maybe Mas has water. Send probe, probe gets rusty. Yup Mars has water.
So we learn a bunch of things about Mars, but what do they help? Most space exploration is just a form of "infotainment" with very little use to anyone. There are a gazzillion unexplored issues on planet earth that are surely more important for us to be investigating.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I seem to remember every parking space in every car park I've seen in America had a slick of leaked engine oil in the centre of it, not a common sight over here in the UK!
True, but in the UK we have the sense to drive German cars.
A year to get to the moon? Come on, the U.S. got there in three days over 30 years ago.
Recent speculation is that the very center has a high ratio of Uranium, enough so that the pressure actually creates a self-sustaining natural nuclear reactor. When it gets too hot it diffuses and shuts down, only to coalesce and restart again (never a big boom). This starting and stopping of the nuclear processes at the Earth's core may be responsible for our planets large magnetic field, and occasional shut downs and reversals of the magnetic field as this nuclear process fluctuates.
You're right that the center would be weightless, but under more pressure than we can possible create in the lab with the best diamond anvils. It only takes a few miles of crust to crush carbon to diamonds, and here we are talking 8,000 miles of rock pressing down. Though the rock (iron) at the center isn't adding any additional pressure, it has thousands of miles of rock above it that is. Quite the hellish place.
BTW, I don't know how I typed Biq in my rirst post when I meant to type Big (no one seems to have noticed)
Letter To Iran
Gotta learn to use that preview button.
Sheesh, this is almost recursive.
Letter To Iran
Perhaps George Lucas had something to do with it...
---- I have nothing more to add.
It's fairly simple. The ESA doesn't have a rocket capable of putting a payload on a lunar path. AFAIK Arianne is really only good for LEO stuff. The only two countries with lunar capable rockets are I believe the Russians and the USA. Of course, the ultimate lunar capable rocket, the Saturn V, is dead, so all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that NASA will come to its senses and bring back the big dumb booster.
This is my sig.
Can any astrogeologists explain why the assumption is that the Moon is a result of debris from a two-planet crash as opposed to regular accretion of debris the way moons were formed on the other planets? Billions of years ago, each planet was a gradually coalescing disc, and the jovian planets still have evidence of this in their rings. The closer planets instead have moons - I assume because the Sun's gravity is stronger at our closer distance from the Sun, and caused the rings of the closer planets to aggregate as the debris rotated around the Earth more quickly when approaching the Sun and more slowly when moving away. I know our Moon is rather large compared to many others, but the idea of a two-planet crash seems unlikely given how the planets seemed to have found their natural distances from each other without some missing rogue planet threatening to collide.
every stain tells a story
Here is a link to a Discovery article
Nuclear Planet
Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?
Yes the core is mostly Iron, but it's not pure iron. I mentioned iron as a core material in my post.
Letter To Iran
OT I know but...
You know why the British don't build computers, right?
Have you ever heard of ARM? I've heard a rumour, apparently, that are one or two of these CPUs in the world.
Cool ! I hope the finished maps can be downloaded from their website :) I would like to make some flyby videos in 3dsmax or something. Since everything is grey on the moon we dont need no textures either I would guess.
I heard somewhere (don't hit me) that the moon could be hollow. The ejecta formation hypothesis sujests that the lighter surface material of both early planets goes mostly into the smaller of the 2 resulting planets. The fact that the moon (mostly) orbits the Earth shows (doesn't it?) that the moon is a lot lighter (or is that less dense?) Either way a chemical reaction inside a large lump of mostly silica could make a large hollow bubble that would cool quicker as the surface area grew. How much power does the X ray on board have? Is it only supposed to measure surface material or can it see further into the crust (1 meter?, 20 meters?) of the moon?
Anyway, If noone else thought of it, I did first and copy-righted it. You all owe me when the news comes in. Moon - Hollow!
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
The Alien Moonbase as reported by Neil Armstrong. http://www.beyondtopsecret.com/UFO_Moon_Base.html
The German Nazi Base on the Moon http://www.beyondtopsecret.com/UFO_German_Moon_Bas e.html
and the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation http://www.ufoseries.com/hardware/lunarLanding-M.j pg
It is going to be in polar orbit. This means it'll be looking straight down the poles on each orbit.
I think the British Science Mueseum has a computer designed a couple of centuries ago that disagrees with you.
No light or energy from the sun reaches these parts. From miles up, we have a very lightweight craft that can only monitor what is reflected or scattered. Yet, you think that it will see into these craters?
For a small comparison, try going on a very tall glacier at the south pole and imagine a crevise 3 miles down. Now imagine that it is winter ther (June, july). Now look inside that crevise without any flashlight or any light of any type. Tell me what you see.
You're right. Its hard to find scientists who support the idea though. Mostly because its a solution looking for a problem. Field reversals have already been seen in computer models of the dynamo theory.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show