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Hubble Zooms In On Moon Minerals
DIY News writes "Lunar scientists have already returned to the moon, using the Hubble Space Telescope and old Apollo Program rock samples to begin prospecting for useful ores. Locating ores rich in oxygen and metals is seen as the first step in making the next decade's human return to the moon more self sufficient and cost effective. Some wavelengths of UV are filtered out by Earth's atmosphere, which is why Hubble can do the job better than a ground-based telescope."
They should save that telescope.
And, First Post?
So how about a hires shot of the flag and footprints so we can all say "I TOLD YOU SO !"
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I sure am glad that such a waste of valuable resources like the Hubble is going to be scrapped soon. The sooner we stop doing such useless things with it like valuable research that will directly result in more efficient space travel, the better.
my pet machine
Moon explorers will always have cheese to eat
"We require more minerals"
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
They could then create enclosed areas for harvesting the by-products, might be cheaper. Any Ideas?
mine the moon already!
Seriously, this is good news. The rovers planned later should send some nice live pictures for the kids at home. The sooner we use resources off-planet the better.
props to the NASA team.
Thank you Dave Raggett
here's some more.
I wasn't aware Hubble could focus to so close of an object. Anyone have details about this?
They're going to use the moon as some sort-of nuclear byproduct dumping site or something eventually. At least, once Microsoft buys half of it and McDonalds 1/4 of it. Wait.. I remember a site where you could buy land on the moon.. wtf?
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
I've always liked Hubble, not only for pushing back the bounds of our knowledge (and more importantly our ignorance, its made us realise there is much more we don't understand) but also for the very very cool pictures that get people interested in science.
This is a very useful and productive use of Hubble... but will it help it get more funding? I'm not sure that the chaps in the Whitehouse will get excited about finding rocks on the Moon unless they can claim that THIS was where Saddam had is WMDs.
Rock A - No oxygen
Rock B - No oxygen
Rock C - No oxygen
Rock D - A bit of metal
Rock E - A bit of oxygen
Rock F - No oxygen
When they find something the photo is going to be rubbish, even worse than when scientists try and get people excited about red dust on Mars.
I suggest that they do the colouring job on the Moon that they always do on the star systems, and make it look way cooler...
"Rock X not only has a large amount of gold, shown in gold, and oxygen, shown in blue, but also various other minerals, show in pretty rainbow colours and is resting on a mauve background which represents the futility of mans existance and the desire to expand our knowledge"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I wish we could have a hybrid approach to space flight. Start with an electro-magnetic rail gun to launch bulk supplies and massy stuff (girders, sheet metal, oxygen, water, spare fuel) into orbit, coupled with rocket launches to carry fragile stuff (people, computers). With cheap bulk-to-orbit, put together a real space station and get working on the space elevator from the top down.
While we're up there, how about we start work on power satellites? We can reduce the cost of electricity, reduce dependence on foreign oil, and fight global warming in one fell swoop! Once we have cheap bulk-to-orbit lots of things become feasible. The first private company to achieve this cheaply will be disgustingly profitable.
Why, oh why could't I have been born filthy rich?
Also, I'm sure there's folks in government that's pushing for the manned flight because of a fear that China will get there first. I don't know exactly why that would be a bad thing. To keep others off, they would have to bring weapons and troups. There would have to be some really valuable minerals there to be worth it.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
That's only about 10^{-8} parsecs, though.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
we find out that's no moon!
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Dear god man, no! Didn't you see what happened in 1999 when there was an explosion and the moon was torn out of earths orbit and flung into outer space!
http://www.space1999.org/
The HST does not have sufficient resolution for this. The biggest thing that astronauts left on the moon is on the order of 1m, and the moon is 4e8 meters away, for an angular size of about 2.5e-9 radians. To resolve this at a wavelength of 800nm, you need a circular mirror with a diameter of 390m = 1.22 * 8e-7 / 2.5e-9. It would be cheaper to go and look, rather than to build a mirror that big.
After NASA's new directore Michael Griffin recently called the space shuttle and space station "mistakes" I would bet that this story was cultered-up to soften his comments. From http://www.wftv.com/news/5032927/detail.html KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. -- There were stunning comments made Wednesday by NASA's new leader: Michael Griffin believes the space shuttle and the international space station programs were mistakes. Now, Space Coast workers are firing back. People at Kennedy Space Center were generally shocked to read what Griffin said. NASA's administrator has said before he believed the shuttle was flawed, but 14 people gave their lives to the shuttle program and other people who devoted their lives said Griffin went too far. "I saw that this morning and immediately spilled coffee all over myself," said Charles Mars. Mars spent years working on the planning and development of the space shuttle and the space station and when he read NASA's administrator called the programs a mistake, he took it personally. "You know, I get angry. I can't believe I was working on a mistake. Two mistakes, shuttle and the space station. No, not a mistake," Mars said.
A classic cartoon: http://dennisglass.com/cartoons15.html
So did they have to use a flash to get a pic of the dark side of the moon?
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
And the only thing we get a clear image of is a blocky looking dude flicking us off as hard as he possibly can.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
Why ruin the moon by mining it? Asteroids have way more resources anyway. The moon should be maintained as a tourist locale and dirty work should stay on asteroids.
Dibs!
All this time, geeks on Slashdot have been telling people that the Hubble isn't equipped to look at the Moon, and that it can't resolve a detail as fine as the Apollo landers.
I haven't RTFA, so I assume it's looking for minerals through some sort of spectographic analysis, much like we use telescopes to determine the matter composition of distant light sources like stars?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You sir, need to find a wife.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Did you fall out out of a computer? Like the previous comment....you need to find a wife.......PLEASE ;) ;)
Since it's almost Halloween, I figured I'd go ahead and post a warning I found while searching for the exact Quayle quote:
Your uber knowledge of napkin math makes me feel stupid :(
I'm not worthy...I'm not worthy...I'm not worthy!
Life is not for the lazy.
What happened? I remember when we were told that aiming Hubble at the Moon or the Earth would destroy it's sensitive instruments.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
There are well known principles of physics that prevent the Hubble from seeing anything clearly. You just have to do the math:
% 281+m+%2F+250000+miles%29+in+radians&btnG=Google+S earch">2.5 x 10^-9 radians.
Rayleigh Criterion
Between that and Google Calculator, you can figure out how big a mirror you need to be able to see a 1 meter wide object on the moon. The moon is 250,000 miles away, so the angle subtended by such an object is
a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=arcsin
Plugging that in for the desired angle in the Rayleigh Criterion equation, you can see that you need a mirror of almost 300 meters in diameter to resolve this image. That's 1000 feet. The Hubble has a mirror that is about 8 feet wide.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
"The latest lunar prospecting first required aiming Hubble at Apollo landing sites and looking with special filters that showed only subtle UV signatures reflected by soils there.
By then comparing the Hubble data to actual laboratory-studied samples that astronauts brought back from the same sites, they were able to get a clear idea just how these same minerals look through Hubble's eye. The Hubble Space Telescope can discriminate very subtle color differences on the surface," said planetary scientist Mark Robinson of Northwestern University. So subtle that Hubble can see mineralogical differences in rocks that look identical in color to the human eye, he said."
So the Hubble can in fact discern with a usable degree of precision....
"At Aristarchus, Hubble detected what appeared to be an abundance of the mineral ilmenite, which is good news, said NASA lunar scientist Michael Wargo. By heating or passing an electrical current through ilmenite, it's a simple matter to release oxygen, which can be used for breathing and for rocket fuel, he explained."
It will be easy to extract at least one useful element....
Ahhh...I'll just include the rest of the article.
"In some ways the Hubble prospecting is just the bare beginning of the next phase of lunar exploration, said Garvin. The next step will be taken by the robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is being built to map out the moon's resources in details.
A second lunar probe is also being planned, all before the planned return of humans to the moon by about 2018, as directed by President George W. Bush's vision for humans in space.
In a sense, said Robinson, the Hubble prospecting experiment is giving scientists the first taste of how to interpret the deluge of lunar data that will be coming from those spacecraft.
"It will be a Niagara Falls of data," he said. "This is really going to jump start our ability to understand this data.""
So this Hubble use is part of what seems to me to be a sound plan for preparing to build a base on the moon.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
In the 60s the US was rolling from the boom of the 50s, the recapitalization of the US following the Depression and WW2, there was another huge fall off right after WW2, so really the lull had lasted from 1930 to 1947. From '47 to '63 there was a huge boom and things were good. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Polaris missiles, Minuteman, Titan and a host of other rocket projects slammed out. US and Western defense were tied to rockets.
Then the costs of the Great Society and Vietnam started to pile on, the economy started lagging at the same time. The moonshots were inertia of the early 60s but cuts were coming. Apollo ended in '72 as the economy really started to lag, then the '73 War and the Oil Crisis kicked our behinds.
The US didn't need heavy lift rockets for national defense anymore, so Space became a sideshow, the Russian economy lagged too inspite of thier oil independance and so thier programs lagged at the same time. They build Mir and two shuttles, we built the Shuttles, probes and Hubble.
The 80s were on again and off again economicly. The boom of the 90s could have funded a Mars shot, but NASA blew it's pitch to Bush 41 with talk of a half trillion dollar bill and the Clinton Administration didn't get Space and didn't get Defense and so NASA crawled along.
So, has there been any substantive discussion about how we might not want to look up at the Moon and have it begin to actually look like Swiss Cheese? Why would we want to destroy such an object that we have seen the same face of since Humans began (whether that's 10,000 years ago, or 1 million...)? Do we really want to see strip mines when we look up at the Moon? Or the lights of night mining operations breaking the apparent illusion of "phases of the Moon"? Will we only mine the side of the moon facing away from Earth?
Many people were very upset when the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up the great Bamiyan Buddha statues, carved over 2,000 years ago. The Moon was made over 4 billion years ago. Isn't it worth decrying defacement of the Moon *even more* than those comparatively young works of art?
I can see my house from here!
Better is the enemy of good enough. - Russian proverb.
"Honey, I love you, but I'm tired of you talking about this stuff. Why don't you talk to your nerd friends on Slashweb or whatever it's called".
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/
and here
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/1283 056.html?page=1&c=y/
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Once again -- the Troll nazi's have modded-down the only funny post on the page. Everybody give it up for our neo-con
Cheers guys.
At the very least it could be used to notify people when they need to touch up their hair color because of exposed roots.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
Ya but think of all the other great stuff we could do with a mirror that big!
If it's dead, you killed it.
We'd need it to fry the giant space ants...
Bah! Spoken like a true science apologist. We can't see foot prints or flags on the moon because WE NEVER WENT. Everyone knows shooting a rocket up that high would break a hole in the crystal sphere over the earth, and the black liquid inkiness outside would spill in and drown us all!
Which, when roughly translated, means that the moon is just too damn far away.
Now, didn't that sound much better?
More like...
"Goddamn that science shit makes me wet! Lets Fuck!"
Why in gods name isn't there a lunar orbiter satellite? Surely it would cost too much to set one up, and we could get some really hi-res images of the surface, I mean we really should have better quality ones by now.
I asked my brother-in-law, who pulled the data from the HST ACS, and he says he could see the Apollo landers even before the digital cleanups.
The science objective was to look at Aristarchus in UV to determine the presence of a particular mineral that was found in all the lunar rocks brought back from the Apollo 15 and 17 landing sites. They looked at those sites first as a baseline, then they looked at Aristarchus.
So: should I believe some numbers posted by somebody I don't know on slashdot (who thinks a lunar lander and its splash are less than 1 meter wide) or the eyewitness account of a man I know personally (who handles the Hubble output for a living?) You tell me!
Interferometry and adaptive optics would decrease the cost by breaking the telescope into many smaller telescopes to acheive the same collecting power. The OWL is a proposed 100m telescope, but 390m is probably not even on the drawing board yet...
I would say the general problem with this is: what's in it for the bacteria? On Earth prokaryotes use sunlight to split CO2 and water because they get reduced carbon to build themselves. So if you want to train them to munch on other carbon-containing compounds (e.g. raw sewage or light industrial chemical waste), it can be done, as long as they still get their carbon atoms. You can get them to adapt some of their existing carbon-containing molecule crunching pathways to crunch your target molecules.
But on the Moon, what you've got is oxidized metals, presumably lots of iron, magnesium, aluminum, and so forth -- and very little oxidized carbon. I expect bacteria generally have no mechanisms for reducing these metal oxides because there's no reason to do such a thing on Earth. They're just not interested in shiny steel carapaces or pure copper wiring. So it would be pretty hard, if not impossible, to modify bacteria to do it on the Moon. You'd have to try to build completely new biochemical pathways. Easier just to build a solar-powered smelter, I'd think.
That said, I do think one could hope to take a page from the bacterium's book. Think nanotech smelters, that is, instead of acres of pipes and furnaces. Some kind of nanomachine that would harvest UV-vis photons from the Sun and use them to directly electrochemically reduce metal oxides. That way you don't need to be burning precious low-molecular-weight fuels to power your factory.
Another option: move the Hubble into orbit around the moon. I wonder if THAT would provide sufficient resolution (and if it'd be cheaper than landing on the moon again). Sean
man, what an eyefull.
I think you are in the wrong forum to be tossing around facts like that..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Interferometry.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
However, the article states that Hubble is using UV light, in particular it's working with UV wavelengths that are mostly absorbed by our atmosphere. The article is a bit light on details, but if we were to try to work in the far UV where the wavelength is around 50nm, we would only need a mirror 1/16 as big, or about 24 meters across... ok, you're still right :)
Now I understand why it can't be repaired.
Maybe it can make my penis look bigger!
Hubble doesn't work at such a short wavelength. It's more like 110 nm and up. The wavelength you're talking about is in the extreme UV, and you need special optics to be reflective there.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
seriously. you could even go ahead and get rid of "news for nerds. stuff that matters." and replace it with that.
OK, I just noticed my mistake, It's vs. its. I know, I know...
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
errr yeah the comment. Have they ever pointed that hubble majigger at us earthlings?
-Fasstboy
like buring ships?
What if you took many, many pictures of the same area, probably from slightly different angles and combined the information on all of those pictures? Wouldn't something like that work? I mean theres nothing much moving on the surface of the moon.
I remember Negroponte et al. having done something like that with video, combining a set of consecutive shots of a single target to a bigger, with more resolution, picture.
...as a someone who slept through math it seems - that 0.0072 arc-second number you talk about - would it have to be smaller or larger for better resolution?
If it had 1.1 arc-second would that be good? Or Would 0.00000001 be the ultimate?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There. ungeekerized.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
We need to send satellites to Lunar orbit. It certainly can't be that hard, based on what we've been able to do. And it'd bring us a lot more information than pointing the hubble at the moon. Whatta ya say NASA/ESA/Russian/Chinese dudes?
-
14:52 [Story posted]-- Locating ores rich in oxygen and metals is seen as the first step in making the next decade's human return to the moon more self sufficient and cost effective.
15:02 -- I'm not sure that the chaps in the Whitehouse will get excited about finding rocks on the Moon unless they can claim that THIS was where Saddam had is WMDs.
15:23 -- What are you going to complain about when W is not longer in the whitehouse?
22:05 -- But dude, Bush is like going to rescind the constitution and become emperor like hitler and stuff!
Nice... Godwin's Law demonstrated in only T plus eight hours 47 minutes. Slashdot is a bastion of restraint. You could get there in minutes on Usenet!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I referred your post to a couple of space scientists, and they essentially said that if you assume that the HST is a giant 17th century spyglass connected to a Kodak instamatic, your numbers are probably correct. But in any case the lunar landers are quite a bit bigger than 1m across, so I have no idea how you got modded "insightful".
Sure, I screwed up a URL, but I did real freaking math and got labelled a troll? Screw you, modhole.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M