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."

Comments

If there is a Republican president in 2008...

[arpk4n3]

Dibs!

what?

[p51d007]

Did you fall out out of a computer? Like the previous comment....you need to find a wife.......PLEASE ;) ;)

No, NASA is not trying to make geeks look bad.

[douglips]

There are well known principles of physics that prevent the Hubble from seeing anything clearly. You just have to do the math:

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% 281+m+%2F+250000+miles%29+in+radians&btnG=Google+S earch">2.5 x 10^-9 radians.

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.

Re:Try This

[Richard Dick Head]

.. re-engineering some bacteria to live off the stuff actually easily available on the moon ..

I think your time would be better spent trying to genetically engineer flying pigs that eat human waste then shit Rold Golds and piss Heineken.