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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."
Wherever it has the best/most cheese. Therefore, if the astronauts get stranded, they won't go hungry.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Please forgive if my sarcasm detector is on the fritz, but you do know that the moon's rotation coincides with its orbit around the Earth, not the Sun, right? There is no side of the moon that's permanently dark...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Redundancy is always key and it is more efficient to built two highly probably successes than one extremely probably success.
It's the most earthlike planet in the solar system barring earth, and it appears to have formerly supported an atmosphere and liquid water, meaning it could possibly do so again. It's the only planet in the solar system that we could have a reasonable expectation of terraforming on a reasonable timescale. I'd say that's the long-long-long-term purpose.
On a shorter timescale, we'll certainly learn a lot, and a lot of it will be stuff we can't learn on the moon. However, we need to step up operations on both of them. What we learn from comparing similar surveys of three planets (or at least, two planets and a moon) will tell us a lot more than what we'll learn looking at two, and it won't be linear, because of the added basis for comparison.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have a funny definition of the word 'finally'.
"Congress voted Saturday to give NASA all of the $16.2 billion it sought for 2005"
"Congress on Wednesday approved a $16.5 billion budget for NASA, fully funding the administration's moon-Mars exploration initiative for a second consecutive year."
Quite true. But at the poles, there are craters which are permanently dark.
Really, the poles seem an obvious choice to me - constant light, constant dark, potential ice, new ground to explore - why not? Besides, it would be neat to have a simple pole near your complex plane.
It's time for Operation Crazy Plan.
If we make a commitment to return to the moon we should be prepared to explore, armed with airplanes (both manned and UAV), MPS (GPS on the moon) constellation, multiple bases, regular supply drops and greenhouses. We made it to the moon in the 1960s with technology that is downright scary by todays standards, we should prepare to return to the moon with a vengence on July 20, 2019.
Swing and a miss... it was congress that was holding stuff up..Bush wasnt the issue. (but then again i bet you dont go a single day without griping about him (cause god knows he actually effects you in a meaningful daily basis)
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
...when did the Poles get to the moon ahead of the Americans and why are we considering landing on them? Let's make it the equator and take second place. Go Poland!
Huh? Oh.
Nevermind.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
At first I thought this was an "Ask Slashdot" entry, at which point I thought, "I'm not sure I want to trust NASA with a shuttle program."
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
after all, if we've travelled all the way to the moon, we might as well get an Earthtan for all our trouble, and break out the Virgin Daquiris in their squeeze tetrapacks all round.
... um, wait, last time I checked we were at a negative savings rate as a nation because of Tax Cuts for Billionaires so they can buy jewelry for their teacup chihuahuas ....
Heck, we should think about making a Club Med on the Moon - we'll have lots of Lunar Tokens to buy water with - ok, dirty ice crystals from crevices, but the same concept.
And we should put up a big neon sign that says "UFOs Land Here! Interplanetary Spaceport! Have your Binary Passports ready!"
But whatever we do, let's just borrow the money for it from the overflowing national treasury built up by all those savings we've been saving
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Meh. The problems of today are political, not practical.
It's not a lack of agricultural production or transportation capacity that causes famines anymore, it's politics. In recent times, India has had food supply shortages but no famine due to good management of available resources. And Somalia has had food supply surpluses but rampant famine due to bad management of available resources. And that's just one example.
I figure, politics is good for solving a lot of problems in the world, but not all of them. It also causes a lot of problems. And since it's not going away, at least it can give us some space research as a side effect.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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"
The downside of being on the dark side is that you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
The advancement of the species.
Not everything has to have an "end game."
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
Screw the observatory.
put a radio telescope array or use a nuke to carve out a crater that makes arecibo look like a childs toy.
Imagine the sensitivity and possibilities with a dish the size of France unencumbered by the twits on the planet broadcasting at massive wattage AND having a nice big RF sink to your back between you and the noisy planet.
That would rock, be relatively easy compared to a regular observatory and probably only take very few launches to get all the parts on location.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We need to do a study of where the richest cheese deposits are and land there.
Already found it.
Look here zoom in completely on point D.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What is the scientific end game of sending people to Mars?
Robert Burns figured it out in the 1700s.
"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Hmm, I'm curious, where does this technology actually exist (other than on paper and figments of engineer imaginations). The last time I checked 'we' dont have the technology to get humans reliably to/from low orbit, never mind anywhere near the moon.
So many folks seem to think that just because it was done in the 60's, it's easy, trivial, and a no brainer to go land on the moon. It's hard, expensive, and currently the technology to do it doesn't exist except on paper and in sci-fi literature. The closest thing the usa has to a manned lunar capabable piece of hardware is some rusty old Saturn V hulks sitting outside of some museums that relish 'the good old days' when america was actually a leader in the space race.
In the 60's the landing was equatorial for a lot of technical reasons. Today, moon landings are sci-fi, for a lot more technical (combined with political and financial) reasons. Politicians may talk about going to the moon, but follow the money, it's not going to the moon, it's going to wars overseas. The talk of moon landings is nothing more than political rhetoric designed to gather up votes from folks that cant see the forest for all the trees, and actually believe that such things are in the plans of the administration. If it was actually in the administration plans, the mandate would be such as it was in the 60's, to get far enough into the program that it could NOT be cancelled at the expiry of the 8 year term, to much already invested. In reality, this administration is neatly talking the talk that allows for more talk, but not actually allocating funds to make it happen, then putting on schedules such that all the talk becomes a financial responsibility for a future administration. In laymans terms, that means, not gonna happen.
This article on /. is a perfect example of the propoganda working. So many folks seriously considering where a moon landing should occur, keeps the grassroots talk happening. Reality is, talk is cheap, and if the hardware is not being designed and built at this stage of the game, there is no program that needs to survive the change of administration coming in a relatively short timeframe (next election). That's when reality will start to hit home, talk is cheap, but it takes money to buy rockets, and, there isn't going to be any money for rockets. This administration is so adamant about that, they have neatly scheduled the shuttle out of existance to happen in the early years of the next administration, and, there is nothing of substance happening on a replacement.
This administration has neatly set the stage to wash the manned space program out of existence. Big noises about safety, and shedules for shuttle retirement, virtually guarantees the shuttle will be history after 2010. Potential replacements are not yet under construction, and, the big bills to be paid for that construction are scheduled to be postponed into the next administration, where somebody else will be responsible for axing the program. The end result, no manned capability at all, and the USA will be on par with Europe for space exploration ability. The current administration is pouring just enough money into the shuttle program that it can limp along on the occaisional launch, so that they dont get the brand as the ones that axed it. At the same time, they are creating a political and financial environment where it's impossible for the program to survive, and impossible to get a replace ment program into the phases of actually doing something other than talk and paperwork. That talk and paperwork will continue until the cost of actually constructing hardware is somebody elses problem.
I'm old enough that I was able to watch the lunar landings of the 60's live on tv. As a child, I thought it was the beginning of a whole new world, and I would be able t
However, I don't think we should go to the moon at all. I think we should get our house in order first.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
-- Larry Niven, quoted by Arthur Clarke in interview at space.com, 2001
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
use a nuke to carve out a crater
Somehow, on the Moon, that seems a bit redundant.
-- Alastair
I think you meant Olympus Mons. Mons Veneris is something completely different...
The real question is can we get back to the moon at all? The US govt is likely to cut funding rather than increase it as the Hubbert Curve begins to bite.
Yes to the above questions. Just get humanities collective butt off this dirt ball. 30 years ago would have been a time to start...
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.
Although science is a nice side-benefit, the main reason for going to the Moon this time around is to learn how to live there and make use of the local resources, as a step towards making humanity a space-faring species.
The place where we landed last time on the moon - in some studio near or in Hollywood.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I would just aim for the middle and hope we hit it!
not everything technological came from the space program,
and besides would you argue as vehemently for war as you
would for space exploration when you find out how much
war made our technology progress??
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.
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
Educate yourselves.
For those of you that are too freakin lazy to go to the site here is a sample of what we get from the space program:
- Computer Technology - NASA Spinoffs
- Advanced keyboards, Customer Service Software, Database Management System, Laser Surveying, Aircraft controls, Lightweight Compact Disc, Expert System Software, Microcomputers, and Design Graphics.
- Consumer/Home/Recreation - NASA Spinoffs
- Dustbuster, shock-absorbing helmets, home security systems, smoke detectors, flat panel televisions, high-density batteries, trash compactors, food packaging and freeze-dried technology, cool sportswear, sports bras, hair styling appliances, fogless ski goggles, self-adjusting sunglasses, composite golf clubs, hang gliders, art preservation, and quartz crystal timing equipment.
Now quit whining and go back to your boring job like the rest of us. Quit wasting your employers money here whining.your logical fallacy is known as a 'false dichotomy' or a false choice.
you see, you assume that we EITHER go to the moon OR 'get our house in order first'. Why can't we do both simultaneously...hmmm...
And, this is definitely not a budget issue. DoD spending vs. Nasa spending...it's a joke.
Who goes on holiday when their house is a mess eh?
You're not joking, are you? Some (most?) slashdot readers ALWAYS have a messy house, holiday or not...I know I wouldn't let a messy house keep me from going on a weeklong heli-boarding trip in Alaska...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Should We Land on the Moon's Poles or Equator?
Yes!
Becasue technologies developed for space flight can help with the problems here.
Think about it. What do you have to do to travel through space? Clean air, recycle waste, use energy efficent designs, and improve communications.
To go farther then the moon, or stay on the moon longer, better batteries and improved techniques for creating electricity will be needed.
What we have is an agency that can have the opportunity to create technologies to help 'clean our house'.
Plus, tyhe governemt got back more then it spent for the moon trips. The amount of taxes spent by the companies and workers of companies who make there money selling products whose RnD effort go directly back to NASA is staggering.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I found these two wikipedia articles really informative...
... the far side has a different texture compared to the near side - it is battered and densely-cratered, and doesn't have the dark spots (maria) that the near side has. The crust of the Moon is 40 km thicker on the far side.
... because of the way the moon rotates, we can actually see 59% its surface -- not the 50% you'd expect. See this excellent graphic for an explanation.
Far side of the moon
Libration
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
Nuclear reactors don't have to use water as a coolant. They can use metals with reasonably low melting points like lead and sodium, and as another poster noted some reactor designs use inert gasses that don't change phase.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
If you are looking for "investors" or "funding" you better damn well have an "end game". People don't spend money because "it's a good idea". They spend money because there is a purpose, a goal, a DIRECT benefit, or a DIRECT return.
Libertas in infinitum
http://it.is.rice.edu/~rickr/goddard.editorial.htm l
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So you think that looking ahead to the long term, having something to dream about, and doing something that has, can, and will yield positive benefits for society isn't a good idea?
By the way, global warming, environmental damage, oil reserves, financial problems, overpopulation, and the like aren't new. Every one of them existed 40 years ago. Every one of them will exist 40 years from now, although what we are doing about each can, will, and does change constantly.
And they didn't stop us before and they aren't going to stop us now. We also don't need to stop doing other things to focus on those problems -- that's why we have different agencies and companies and the like that have different foci. Each has specialized resources and experience. Each has its own job to do.
You may not be a troll, but you're not well informed.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Being an astronaut sounds cool when you're 12 years old, but really, we shouldn't go back to the moon at all. People don't seem to understand how expensive it is to get humans to the surface and back safely. There is no conceivable way to make money (or even break even) by going there, so an economic argument is right out. There aren't any valuable or useful minerals there. Even if there were, it would cost a ridiculous amount of money to get significant quantities back to Earth. The moon isn't a good place for a base of any kind. It doesn't even have an atmosphere -- space junk will pulverize anything big that's there for a long period of time.
The most valuable things you can get on the moon, we already have: nice pictures of Earth.
Good idea: Going to the moon in 1969. It showed the Russians who was in charge.
Bad idea: Going back. The moon is dusty, boring, and useless.
It's ALL dark.
Focus, schmocus; even assuming that 100% of the energy yield of every nuclear bomb on earth goes into shifting the Moon, with none at all wasted in light or heat, it wouldn't affect it noticeably. The Moon is really, really heavy.
Sit down some time and work out the kinetic energy of the Moon. It masses 7.36E22 kilos, and is moving at about 1 km/s. That's 7.36E28 joules, or 1.75E13 megatons. The entire population of the earth is only some 6E9 people, so perhaps if every single person on the earth had a few thousand H-bombs and we let them all off at once on the Moon, we might just affect its orbit significantly...
Been watching Space 1999 and Dragonball lately, I suppose? Sorry, guys: moving small planets around (and the Moon is not far off the size of Mercury) takes a lot of energy. Presumably Muten Roshi was able to unleash an energy blast comparable to 10,000,000,000,000 hydrogen bombs when he blew up the moon at the Tenkaichi Budokai...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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 ?
In that case, they're worrying about the entirely wrong thing. The process of the solar wind stripping away a planets atmosphere is _slow_; it happens on a timescale of millions of years. Geomagnetic reversals only take a few hundred to a few thousand years to complete.
Obviously, any plan for the continued survival of the species would require this, as well. However, it's not like it's either-or. Both will cost finite resources (You can't just pour money into either one, after a point, it's wasted anyway). However, no level of preparation and preservation on Earth can stop some potential disasters. We can bring all our current woes to a halt, build an asteroid defense system of epic proportions, chart everything so large as a peanut in the solar system, and still be taken totally unawares by a long period comet entering the solar system faster than we can deflect it. This chance is small in itelf. The odds of it befalling both the Earth and Mars within a short enough timespan that neither can be recovered are so low as to be zero.
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.