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NASA Begins Work on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
soldeed writes "Space.com is reporting the beginning of construction on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Which is scheduled for launch in late fall of 2008. It will orbit the moon at fifty kilometers and image the entire surface at high resolution. A far Ultraviolet instrument will enable it to see into areas permanently in shadow and see if there is indeed ice there. LRO will count craters and image American and Soviet landing sites."
Like I'm going to buy that. If they could fake the whole dog and pony show in the 60's do they really think we're so guallible as to beleive they can't doctor a few images? Like NASA doesn't have photoshop.
On a more serious note, when I read these amazing stories I can't help think of Hamlet:
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me;
Here we are performing these amazing feats of technology while down on the ground we are firebombing each other, mincing words about what is and isn't torture, and rioting in the street over a few line drawings. Part of me thinks we should focus our resources on problems here where our feet touch the ground, but another part thinks that we have tried that long enough and hopes that maybe by demonstrating how admirable our faculties really are we may move beyond our differences and inspire some solidarity.
The article doesn't mention if these images will be public domain or not. It would be really awesome if they were. At present, Google Moon is pretty damn low-res (I know it was created as a joke, but still), being able to zoom in and out of high-resolution pictures of the moon would be really cool.
Ultimately, where there is ice, there is water. And with water, life is sustainable. Earth has a unique situation in thatwe have plenty of water, but based on present propulsion methods, it is terribly expensive to get it off the Earth. The Moon on the other hand may afford us a resource more accessably in lifting terms. Ultimately the Moon is just a small step in further space exploration.
Louis Friedman said "Carl Sagan remarked, many years ago, that the Moon could end up a detour, rather than a stepping stone, to Mars. How lunar missions would lead to a Mars landing must be closely examined. The essential requirement is to keep the focus on sending humans to Mars -- investigating conditions of life and habitability on that planet."
This desire to exlore mars is reliant on our mastering reaching and taming the moon.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Wouldn't it be relatively cheap to duplicate the rovers we've already sent to Mars and get more definitive answers about composition?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I remember the close ups of the Moon from the Google Moon probe. don't yall?
Makes it sound as if we're spying ... on the moon
well, NASA wouldnt want the probe to be shot down by aliens... therefore it has to be pretty covert
You say "rover"? That orbiter must have a _really_ low orbit!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Some things aren't well suited for the private sector.
I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems pretty easy for everyone working on Moon-related projects to get together every so often or read a newsletter or something.
Man, you really need that seminar!
NASA World Wind, which is quite similar to Google Earth, also has Moons and stars etc. You can also "drive" across a landscape, following it's contours, rather than just having fly-bys that don't give a sense of the real heights etc. It's more focused on educational uses, and open source too. All in all, a very interesting alternative to google earth. I wish the two projects would collaborate.
Having said all that, I get weird "application error" messages with the latest version. Seems to work for most people though. Anyone figured this out yet?
2 Things
1. TFA from 2 days ago mentioned the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (today's TFA)
2. Where do you get the left hand not knowing what the right is doing bit?
The whole point of the LRO is to map the moon so they can decide where they want to land future missions.
"NASA, not Nasa. Jackasses."
OOoooh. I was so confused until you made that correction. Thank you!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
And it can be seen as a preperation for colonization. They're imaging the moon's surface in greater detail and in another part of the spectrum. This will be a big help in determining where to site colonies.
I already curb my dog, thank you.
It will orbit the moon at fifty kilometers and image the entire surface at high resolution.
I see a business opportunity for Google coming up!
(and am waiting for the The Register's Black Helicopters Report about it)
bash$
Take some photo's of any evidence that may be left on the moon from the original trip to finally shut all the whack-job fucks up about us not going to the moon for real initially.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Comets are (mostly) giant ice balls, since they're too small to have atmosphere where did the ice come from?
Seriously folks, water doesn't require an atmosphere to form, hydrogen and oxygen are found throughout the solar system (in varying concentrations). It just so happens that we ended up with quite a lot of water here, while there is not so much elsewhere.
Reconaissance is " An examination of a region as to its general natural features, preparatory to a more particular survey for the purposes of triangulation, or of determining the location of a public work." (The Collaborative International Dictionary of English / kdict).
Military reconaissance (what you're thinking of) is doing a similar thing in a military context. :-)
Obviously, you've spent too much time in the military, and not enough time in an engineering department.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Did they land on the moon? They did. It's not a matter of belief but of fact.
;)
Are you sure? Have you seen imperical proof? Have you been to the moon? Have you personally met anyone who has been to the moon?
For that matter... Can we prove that there was the cold war? Or maybe World War 2?
Maybe my Grandfather was lying to me. Or better yet, he believed he was telling the truth and was brainwashed? What if there is a grand conspiracy to write text books and doctor photographs of events that never happened.
I mean what if we had photoshop for centuries and our ancestors were simply making up events as they went along and all our history boooks are made up?
How do can I prove that all my family members aren't actors and the universe isn't a big joke and all my memories aren't simply false and the universe isn't only 6 seconds old and god is a big supercomputer sitting in some aliens basement?
I can't.
So I'll have to assume everything everyone tells me is true... except the people who are lying to me.
Now I just have to figure out who is lying to me.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If this mission is a success, President Bush hopes that it will lead to a manned landing on the Moon at some point in the future.
Take some photo's of any evidence that may be left on the moon from the original trip to finally shut all the whack-job ....
I agree it would DEFINITELY be interesting to see. I am thinking though, since the last man to stand on the Moon was Eugene Cernan in December 1972 that most of that evidence has been blown away or buried by dust particles.
Maybe if they get high-res scans of the landing areas they can see if anything remains.
I'll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Kenya?
No thanks, I don't want to have the learn the rules for vocal clicks as well.
We can't find bin Laden on Earth...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Considering the expense of space exploration, deep exploration will need many nations to come together. What unites people more then a common goal?
Also, there are many people, and not all of us are firebombing people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Last time I checked, the Moon orbits the Earth in such a way that the same side of it always faces Earth, however, during a solar eclipse, the side of the Moon that faces away from Earth faces the Sun, so how are there places on the Moon that are "permanently in shadow?"
Am I missing something here?
I'll be pretty funny if on the first pass it
sends back images of Chinese workers waving.
There isn't any air to do any "blowing".....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
You can get the details of the spacecraft from Goddard Space Flight Center.
I found it almost comical when I learned that people like the L5 society were actually serious about advocating space colonies, decades ago. (In their case, this means full orbiting cities at Lagrange points...) It just seemed impractical to the point of silliness. Someday, sure, but not now.
Colonizing the moon, even if it just means a permanent base of some kind on the moon, is similarly impractical - though on the moon, at least, there may be a reasonable amount of raw materials to build from. But ferrying people and supplies back and forth would be crazy-expensive. And suppose something goes wrong? Are the people there just hosed or what? Anyone who's living up there for any prolonged amount of time will basically be subsidized by the government for a very expensive and complex life-support system. Food, air, fuel, raw materials, and so on will all have to be provided to sustain the colony. That also means a lot of rocket traffic (and the cheaper ones put out toxic exhaust, not water like the hydrogen rockets.) going up to the moon, a lot of disposable rockets being wasted in space, and a lot of space junk being produced as a result.
The benefits of such an endeavor have the be a lot less abstract to be worth the waste. In time, technology will reach the point where we can do this much more cheaply - that will be the time when it really makes sense to do it. We can accelerate the process a bit by throwing money at the problem, but that can only get us so far...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
How many years has it been since that American flag fell over on the moon? We need to give it a proper moon burial (I mean, we can't exactly burn it up there...) and setup a new one!
Demented But Determined.
If the probe will be orbiting 50 km from the lunar surface, then it will be about twice as close as the Apollo CSM ever got. The typical orbiting distance for that was about 60 nautical miles (about 100 km). By contrast, spy satellites for the military in a Low Earth Orbit are about 500 km above the Earth's surface, and they can (purportedly) read lisence plates. Naturally, the LRO won't be the size, or have the capabilities, of a military spy satellite. Even so, considering the advances in camera technology, even at NASA's cautious rate of adoption, the image quality one can expect will be extraordinary. If NASA was able to get meter-resolution back in the Apollo days, I wouldn't be surprised if we could get an order or magnitude (10 cm) finer detail this go around.
And they'll probably use it to deploy images of a fake landing site, like anybody's ever going to believe that we really landed on the moon. Everybody knows that was made up.
Have you personally met anyone who has been to the moon?
Two of them, actually. All part of the fun of growing up near the JSC.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Remember MIRV technology? How about we send a Delta-2 (or required launch craft) and put a ring around the moon of GPS satellites?
:)
It would sure make mapping, navigating and everything else easier, no? How hard would that be, now that atomic clocks are so small?
BUT BE SURE THEY'RE USING FREQUENCIES that don't mingle with Earth GPS. (I remember a time I wouldn't have to say such obvious things...)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
. . . comets hit the moon, evaporate.
For a few glorious hours or days, the moon has an atmosphere or sorts, of vaporized comet juice.
Most of this gets stripped away, but some vapor finds its way into dark, permenantly shadowed nooks and crannies, where it stays pretty much forever.
Maybe. Maybe the H2 signatures found by the last probe were just traces of hydrogen bound to minerals. We'll find out after this thing does its work.
We can't find bin Laden on Earth...
You're assuming that we're trying. If the US government had found Bin Laden, the public probably would have assumed the war on terrorism is over and not supported the Iraq invasion.
I was actually quite amazed at how well some of the materials actually worked that were used during the Apollo mission. My boss said that a this tape that I was using was actually used on the lander. It is called kapton tape. I stared at it and then realzed how easy it would be for someone to think that it's utterly useless. Anyone not in my position (consistently chucking copious amounts of it into UV chambers without it degrading for a week) would think of it being stupid yellow tape. For people who think I'm making it up: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a12 /a12.landmovie.html That yellow stuff is the tape I use. Then again the freaking moon hoax idiots think the lunder lander was held together by this stuff.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
"full spectrum dominance of the battlespace"
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so0 0richelson
and more at
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=nd0 3moore
I wonder how the rest of the world will react to this?
Will they go 'big' and race to the moon?
Or go smart and do more with less?
In capitalist west US military maps moon.
In Soviet Union KGB maps your room.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Being a Firefox user I've become accustomed to reading the BBC. They seem to treat most acronyms as ordinary words. Is this an analog/analogue issue? Where do the Austrailians stand?
Soviet landing sites do exist on the moon, you know. They were established during the same period as the American landing sites.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Why would you hope for something like this?
I, for one, hope that no Russian cosmonauts were sent to die on suicide moon missions, and that rumors to the contrary are nothing more than macabre urban legends.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You're right that there is no dark side of the moon in the Pink Floyd sense.
But there are small patches where sunlight never reaches. Craters or valleys near the poles. Or caves for that matter.
There are similar places on earth, but they're not as dark and cold due to light and heat being carried by our atmosphere. On the moon, one side of a hill can be tropically hot and the other minus hundreds of degrees.
The USSR landed men on the moon? When did that happen exactly?
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
It melts, and then makes a huge mess if the bag is paper. I'd recommend picking up the ice with your hands or a paper towel, and throwing it in the sink to melt. Using a vacuum is just asking for trouble.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Can it run Linux? If so, I'm making beowulf cluster of these.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
When space travel gets cheap enough - especially if eBay is still around by then.
Or maybe sooner - might not an Indian or Chinese souvineer seeker stop by?
What are the salvage rights to that kind of stuff?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Who said anything about men? The Soviets safely landed seven probes of the Luna series, and a whole lot more... uh... impacted destructively. Details can be found on NASA's web site here:s sr.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunaru
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
...that the ice they are talking about is frozen H2O. NASA is horrifically low on money, so when its administrators start talking about locating stashes of "ice" and "snow", one has to wonder...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Really, I think the best proof that it's not a hoax is that there's no way that many people could keep a secret for that long.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Anyone who thinks that landing a few spods on the surface of the moon was a worthwhile enterprise would probably be at the same intellectual level as those who reckon that the whole thing was faked; not quite the full shilling in either case. As was mentioned earlier, those in doubt should have a look at the data that the Soviets gathered (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1 & 2.) It does seem that the Russian efforts, especially in this regard, were without much of the risk that characterized the fruitless and idiotic attempts at glory that most manned space exploration has involved- before it was largely dropped.
Ahem! I meant EXISTING landing sites! Apollo? I dont recall the names of the soviet rovers and probes, but the soviets put them there so therefore they are SOVIET landing sites! capiche?
Easy, if your mom has small boobs, then she is not an actress.
I think some people from the First Church of Last-Thursdayism would like to give you some reading material. Why not simply say reality itself is a hoax? Or that even the hoax is a hoax?
LOL. :P
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
They wrote a book about this. It was called 1984. It sucked.
I never even heard that one. Or at least I don't remember, maybe it's old age.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"A far Ultraviolet instrument will enable it to see into areas permanently in shadow and see if there is indeed ice there."
If comets are largely ice, and they've crashed into earth, then clearly they've hit the moon as well. So it stands to reason that there must be ice there in shadowed areas.
Here's your proof that it was a fake!
Actually, moontruth.com used to have content about how the video was made. It was filmed in England and done as a joke.
Hey it looks like this story isn't regarded important enough to get it's own department.
How about from the did-they-or-didn't-they dept
Yes, I have no life.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
While you are pointing to a great website, I think this page,
http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions/index.html
is a better starting place. Your is directly to the LROC, which is an instrument on LRO. This link will take you directly to the mission overview, from which you can find info on all the instruments and such.
On a personal note I am glad to see slashdot pick up this story, since I was at the preliminary design review for LRO today.
Orbiter NOT rover.
Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare Yeah you're right, they are pretty rare on the moon.
That's kinda the implied punchline :P
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Lissen, everyone knows (well, the top 50% of us do) that the Apollo moon landings were faked, and of course these new Lunar orbitors will be also!
As proof, I offer you the fact, not theory, that fully 50% of the American people are below average intelligence. Do you think any OTHER country on this planet exhibits these dismal intellectual statistics? How could the USA have ever gone to the moon with this average IQ level?
For that matter, there is no such thing as North America (or South America). We "North Americans" number no more than about 35,000 deluded people, and we live in a large compound in France.
Yes, FRANCE, Dammit! Get used to it. It's time someone spoke up against this "Theory of Columbus" !
.
- aqk
F U
I am 45, and grew up during Apollo missions. I closely followed every mission. I KNOW it happened. It could not be faked. If you disagree, consider, If it were a hoax the Soviet Union and any other country with a radio telescope could tell it was. On launch mornings, the television coverage would include a shot of the Soviet "trawler" hanging off the coast observing the proceedings. In fact, the soviets were very interested in observing our spaceflights. They tracked them in orbit, they tracked them going , decending, acending, and returning from the moon, and then at the splashdown theres another "trawler" hangin around. It was easy to do! you did'nt need a powerful radar as the spacecraft was constantly beaming back telemetry data and radio transmissions in the clear. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world at the time because of their absolute secrecy, the Soviets manned lunar programwas having a little trouble with their N1 boosters blowing up. In light of their own failure, and the general hostile attitude toward the United States, you cannot convince me that they would just stand by and let us evil capitalist pigs get away such a fakery! WE WENT!
Uh, you don't have to have a manned spacecraft to have a landing site of a spacecraft. The article doesn't say anything about cosmonauts because there were never any on the Moon but there's lots of Luna spacecraft. The first successful soft landing was carried out by Luna 9, actually.
Yet again someone manages to RTFA but doesn't do basic research before opening their mouth and revealing their uninformed state.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Facts, not "Dreams of What Could Be":
0. The study of, "To Many Rats In the Rat Cage."
1. This planet is not getting any bigger.
2. There are more people alive today than ever existed.
3. It's the zealous naive logic like the parent submittal that HAS lead directly to the inner cultural tensions; Because 35 years ago We Were On The Moon.
The replies to my post are presumptiously stating some non-existing evidence that supposedly refute my comment as some kind of trumped up rumor, giving my comment a 0 score. If the slashdot community prefers to rudely reject unpopular ideas, as is the case here, then I declare slashdot redundant and my posting time here is over.
So how long after the pictures are taken will the entire moon be available on GoogleMoon?
I got this IQ 'average' thing from a story I read somewhere that one of President Eisenhower's advisors told him about a crisis just after Sputnik went up-
"Fully 50% of our population have below-average IQ!"
Eisenhower was clearly alarmed by this statistic.
But of course there's hope yet- NPR reports that in Lake Woebegon, Minn., all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
- "Prairie Home Companion" on NPR.
.
- aqk
F U