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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.
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.
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.
Well LRO is the first phase of RLEP, the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program. The next phase after LRO (IIRC) is a robotic lander.
Mohttp://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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
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.
We can't find bin Laden on Earth...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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".....
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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
I don't think so - the remnants of the landings site are almost certainly in pristine condition. The moon has (essentially) no atmosphere for winds to blow around, and no atmospheric dust to settle on the site. There are no corrosives to eat away at the remaining equipment - principally the lower half of the LEM. Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare, so there is basically no chance that the sites have been swallowed up.
I can think of only two mechanisms that could bring about wholesale changes to the sites. First a large meteor could have landed on or near the landing site and obliterated it, or covered it with debris. An impact like that would require a substantially-sized meteor - I'd guess on the order of 10 kg. Those kinds of impacts are rare enough as it is, and the chances of any one Apollo site being hit with one are miniscule, let alone all 6. Second, the intense radiation has weakened the man-made objects left behind to the point that they have crumbled to dust. This may be true of the plastics, but the metal remains would be nearly impervious to it, at least on the timescale of decades.
The lunar explorations (robotic and manned) have proven that the Moon's surface does not change quickly. The Apollo astronauts fully expected that their footprints would still be visible in the dust thousands of years from now. In a million years, there may indeed be nothing left of the Apollo sites. On the whole, however, the Moon's surface has not changed during the whole timescale of human civilization.
Imagine a crater, well away from the equator. If the walls are high enough, there will be places on the side nearest the equator that the Sun never reaches, and are in permanent shadow. You also get the same effect on the "back side" of mountains.
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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?"
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon, the Moon's axial tilt is only 3.6 to 6.69 degrees. So at the poles, there could be spots in deep craters that never get sunlight.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
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?
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.
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.
That wouldn't make a lick of sense at the present time. You could spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars sticking up a constellation of navigation satellites for 4 astronauts at a time, or you could spend a couple hundred grand on a radio direction finder system like a mini-LORAN set up at each landing site.
Plus lunar orbits are unstable (the article didn't go into this in detail, but I suppose it's probably due to the big freaking ball of gravity somewhere off in the vicinity of Earth). The satellites would have to frequently adjust their orbits to maintain accuracy. If I remember right, knowing the precisely the orbit of the satellites is critical for the accuracy of GPS.
They wrote a book about this. It was called 1984. It sucked.
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.
Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare Yeah you're right, they are pretty rare on the moon.
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!
So how long after the pictures are taken will the entire moon be available on GoogleMoon?