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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."
I worked on HST software but it was years ago so I may be a bit off base but here is what I recall.
The Cameras on the Hubble don't really focus like we think of with a 35mm camera. They take exposures of various durations and with certain filters in place. Then the raw data is postprocessed on the ground and based on the raw data, the wavelength filters, etc. then "image" is constructed.
With the UV "camera" what they would be doing is taking a (TBD time) open shutter picture of the moon with the filters set to only let UV wavelengths pass to the detectors. The detectors will record the intensity of the light hitting each "pixel" of the camera ("binning") and send that data to the ground for processing. If you go to NASAwatch.com there is an article about this that actually links to the experiment definitions, process, etc that was submitted by the researcher in order to get the (very limited) time with the Instrument.
Google Moon...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
That's kinda like running around in a large field hunting rabbits with a stone club, while there's a large flock of sheep walking around in your back yard.
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The highest resolution Hubble is capable of is 0.0072 arc-seconds.
... well, about 383,800 km
An arc-second is defined such that a 1 meter object will appear as 1 arc-second at a distance of 206,256 meters.
The distance from Hubble (~600km orbit) to the moon (~384,400km) is
So if Hubble produced an image with 1 pixel-per-arcsecond resolution, a pixel would be 1.86 kilometers. But the highest resolution is 0.0072 arc-seconds, or about 140 times better than that.
So the smallest object Hubble can see on the moon is 13 meters wide.
Neither the lander module or the rover are that big. Not even close. Good luck finding something that's less than a pixel wide!
=Smidge=
Which is why we should be building nuclear reactors to produce cheap hydrogen *now*, not 10 years from now. Maybe small ones on boats, that could also distill potable drinking water, as well as produce electricity for local consumption. and so why not hydrogen for non-local (fuel) use, too?
Interested? more information here
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?