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Should We Land on the Moon's Poles or Equator?
Cujo writes "There is at present a lively controversy about sites for a crewed lunar landing. Advocates for landing near the poles, possibly on a mountain, point out the advantages of much higher sunlight availability and possible water resources in nearby cold traps. However, there may be more interesting geology and better mineral resources near the better-explored equator. NASA's Exploration Systems Architecture report lays out some of the tradeoffs."
My bias would be to land on the dark side of the moon (cue music) in order to build an observatory that will be uninfluenced by the earths, radio/tv/light/RF pollution. It could be powered by a small nuclear reactor eliminating the need for solar panels and there may in fact be larger ice deposits on the far side of the moon anyway.
Also, what is this fascination with things on the moon that we can see? I would be much more interested in the things that we do not see as much of.
But I am a neuroscientist and not a rocket scientist, so what do I know?
While we are talking about the moon, I can understand and see the scientific payoffs of sending people back to the moon, but I am much less clear on the whole Mars thing. What is the scientific end game of sending people to Mars?
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Redundancy is always key and it is more efficient to built two highly probably successes than one extremely probably success.
The polar circumfrence of the moon is ony about 3500 km, so any point from the equator to either pole is approximately a quarter of that, 875 km. The original lunar rovers used in the first lunar exploration had a top speed of just under 13 km/hr and very limited ranges, so they would obviously be unsuited to take a "lunar road trip." But it seems to me that we could build a vehicle that was more like a "lunar RV" that could make the trip. Say we improve rover speed to a modest 45 km/hr and assume we can't take a perfectly direct course to a pole...call it 900 km. So it would take 20 hours in your VW lunar rover. As long as they pack enough ganja and doritos, they should be fine. It seems that with the low gravity and cloudless skies, that kind of performance could be achieved with solar power, perhaps boosted by some chemical propulsion. It would have to be capable of carrying enough oxygen for the crew to survive for several days, but it seems like this would be possible.
The moon is great and all. It does, in the long run, in fact help things like sustainability. And I'm not sure about other reasons like H3. But I just don't think it's realistic anymore. Going to the moon will get us advances in rocketry, robotics, and solar panels. And, with NASA, the focus is always on doing things the best way regardless of cost. Does anybody really need more expensive robots and solar panels to make their lives better?
Perhaps we would get more out of sending a few people into the middle of the Pacific and keeping them there for a few years. Let's see how cheaply we can pull off something like that. Instead of expensive electronics, equip them with basic, indestructible technology. We'd get advances in cheap renewable energy, micro-manufacturing, more efficient farming, and affordable, reliable technologies to perform basic tasks like water purification and waste treatment. Perhaps even self-replicating machines would benefit.
I'd rather see research in giving people with nothing more than air, water, and sunlight a standard of living higher than subsistence than figuring out new ways of extracting water from moon dust and building solar panels that work in the arctic. But, like you, I'm probably in the minority here on Slashdot in that regard.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
In the Mythbusters interview, among other places, it has been suggested that the best way to counter the myth that the moon landing was faked is to go back to the moon and bring back something from the previous astronauts.
I've always wondered why the hell we can't prove or disprove the moon landing myth by just pointing a friggin' telescope at it? I mean, if there is any such astronaut junk...couldn't the Hubble or even some small terrestrial telescope pick it out? There's no wind on the moon, so shouldn't the footprints and tire tracks still be visible? Did Neil Armstrong leave the flag planted or bring it back?
Why have I never seen pictures of these features? We can see planets a brazilian light years away but we can't pick out a landing zone a few hundred thousand miles away? The pictures on moon.google.com don't appear to have any better resolution than my digital camera can produce.
So maybe someone can answer this question for me. What prevents us from looking at the moon's surface with any sort of detail, and since the moon is our next big destination resort, why haven't we sent a probe to do the same kind of high-resolution imaging of the surface like we have for every other planet in our solar system? We might need to know where the best places are to build those hydrogen refineries or whatever.
-JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
If you wanted to put an observatory on the moon and keep the moon between it and the interference from the Earth, it would be best to have your observatory on a rail transport system so that when the moon rotates, the observatory can move away from the earth towards whatever side of the moon happens to be the "dark side of the moon" at that time.
Using the same system, you would also want a comms station on rail always pointing TOWARDS Earth so you can keep constant communications with your lunar base(s)
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Alternatively, you could put your observatory out at one of the Lagrange points where gravity between the Earth, Moon, Sun, and stars pretty much hold a station in place at the L point - however, this would not give you the mineral mining capability that a genuin lunar base would.
It's much easier to get back into orbit from the equator due to the moon's rotational speed. This is the same reason those floating satellite launch pads travel all the way to Earth's equator before launch.
Why is there a 300 million difference between those two figures if it's the same budget?
Well, if you're talking about sending probes, I'd say do both (though I'd start with the mountains). I read the articles and the one that discusses the mountains makes some very good points about the habitability of the mountains.
First, you get much more solar power by sitting up there. Second, you are always in communication with the Earth. Third is the possibility of water ice which--if confirmed--could supply water and oxygen to the base. This is the winner, in my book. Of course, if there is no water ice, then all bets are off.
While the "manufacturing" possibilities are better at the equator, the first requirement to me is to get people to the moon and figure out how to keep them alive without having to ship everything they need from Earth. Once that's done, we can start thinking about other sites for doing other things. Heck, there might be a migration away from the poles if the hydrogen/oxygen potential of the rocks at the equator are realized. Though you'd probably still want that sunlight from the poles for power, that could be beamed via satellite eventually.
Amazing that we did it in the 60's (and many times)and today we are debating how and when we should go back.
I'm just reading the book of Kranz (flight director of Apollo mission for the first man on the moon, and other missions as well). It's amazing how fast they were putting together a new mission at that time, and not just repeating the last mission but adding new complexity to it.
Today it takes months if not years to prepare the next shuttle flight, and it does the same as the last flight, nothing more complex.
How did they do it back in the 60's, it's amazing, considering the technology they had. And finally without so many casualties, with all due respect to the families of the crew which has burnt on the pad.
Thumbs up for these guys of the 60's, I guess the race against the russians was the driver. What's the driver today to go back to the moon ?
Spaceflight indeed chews up so much fuel that through using chemical rockets we are just barely capable of getting to the Moon. This also required the development of the F1 Engine that was used on the 1st stage of the Saturn V rocket, which is still considered the most powerful rocket engine that has ever been developed by any rocket engineer. And that took five of those engines to power the first stage. The Russians had a smaller rocket engine for their lunar vehicles, and that was indeed one of the points of failure for their program because they had to have close to 20 engines firing simultaneously to get their lunar vehicle off the ground.
As far as going into Lunar orbit first before landing... well, what do you think the Apollo spacecraft did? The problem is that you have one shot to land until you get some fuel resupply depots in Lunar orbit. It is also going to be much cheaper and easier to manufacture the fuel on the Moon than by hauling it up from the Earth, with the one problem of trying to collect hydrogen for the typical LOX/H2 rocket fuel.
Once you get onto the surface of the Moon, it will be much easier to get around with some sort of surface transportation than trying to fly around with rockets. These can even be solar powered so you don't need to worry about obtaining fuel from the Earth to keep them going, and have electric motors simply pushing against the surface with designs roughly like cars on the Earth. With nearly two weeks of continuous sunlight even on the Equator, I'm sure you can travel a fairly large distance before you run out of daylight and need to build even an emergency shelter from the lunar night.