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NASA Needs Fake Moon Dust
crisco writes "NASA's renewed interest in lunar exploration and 'in situ resource utilization,' or ISRU, is driving the need for tons of carefully faked lunar dust and sand for testing purposes: 'We don't have enough real moondust to go around,' says Larry Taylor, director of Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. To run all the tests, "we need to make a well-qualified lunar simulant.' And not just a few bags will do. 'We need tons of it, mainly for working on technologies for diggers and wheels and machinery on the surface,' adds David S. McKay, chief scientist for astrobiology at the Johnson Space Center (JSC)."
Just take it form the Fake moon landing site.
We all know the truth: the fake moon dust from the LAST moon landing went stale, and they need to rebuild the set so they can shoot more "real moon footage." NASA, so naive, they don't know we're onto them.
That's 5 comments so far about leftover sand from the fake lunar landings. How many do we need?
mean it really WAS a windy day in Arizona...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Blow up the moon. We probably have enough nukes to do it, and how hard can delivery be? The amount of material that drops on the earth as a result will surely be at least several tons.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Another movie remake.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
They need to send a spaceship out to the planet Dune to pick up a load of sand for the fake moon landing. That should work. Just watch out for the worms and Fremen.
Here's the url to phil plaits debunking. I highly recommend that anyone thinking the moonlandings are a hoax check it out.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
I thought that huge pile of ash from Mt St Helens was a close substitute.
;)
:)
Aren't there still piles of it at the end of the ?Toutle? river. Used to be tons and tons of it stacked up by I-5. I'll bet the price is right too
Heck maybe it is worse than lunar dust and they can overbuild the vehicles a bit to get thru it
I happen to have just what they need and it's been stored in a vacuum. Even contains evidence of lunar canines and space dust bunnies. NASA - please let me know if you're interested before Tuesday (trash pick-up).
[Insert pithy quote here]
Armstrong and Aldrin found a thin dust layer on the surface of the moon.
'I am at the foot of the ladder. The LM [lunar module ] footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears. to be very, very fine grained, as. you get close to it. It is almost like a powder. Now and then it is very fine. I am going to step off the LM now. That is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'
When he started walking on the surface of the moon he said:
'The surface is fine and powdery. I can - I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides. of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints. of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.'
When he was collecting samples:
'This is very interesting. It is a very soft surface, but here and there where I plug with the contingency sample collector, I run into a very hard surface, but it appears to be very cohesive material of the same sort. I will try to get a rock in here.'
Apparently the ground was unyielding enough that they had trouble getting the flag planted.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
You joke, but I absolutely remember hearing this same thing a few years ago. I think it was possibly more than five or six years back. Probably it was on NPR.
I haven't read TFA, but in the story I remember hearing, NASA used to have literally thousands of pounds of moon rock and dust from the Apollo missions, but over the years it's been parceled out for various purposes (including being given to school kids, etc.) and now they only have a few pounds left. They want someone to come up with a simulated sand so they can test how it gets into bearings and stuff.
What I'd like to know is why is this still an issue? If it was a problem five or six years ago, you'd think they'd have gotten around to solving it by now. And yet it's still being discussed as if it was a new problem. Then again, I guess this is NASA we're talking about.
The last time I heard about this, the closest moon-dust simulacrum was some type of pulverized volcanic ash. My immediate question was whether you could really simulate the lunar surface using Earth gravity -- even if you were using real moon dust, it seems like its effects on equipment would be radically different on the moon, than it would be here. Here on Earth you have humidity and various atmospheric effects, plus gravity, that could affect how the dust gets into bearings and other components; all of these wouldn't exist on the moon. It seems like if you want to test parts for use on the moon, you'd need something that's not the same as moon dust here on earth.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sounds like a nearly impossible task to replicate lunar dust considering how abrasive the stuff is. This article does a good job of explaining.
why not use recycled building materials that are crushed into a fine powder or whatever consistency is "near" moondust?
Drywall/sheetrock, concrete, I'm sure it can be ground-down and it provides a use for them instead of being chucked into the landfill.
NASA is finally winning over the last few people who believe that the original moon landings were faked and now as they prepare to go back they put out a call for tons of fake lunar soil. I'd suspect that they do some of these things to intentionally draw the charges.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
We've been using it to simulate craters in the classroom for decades.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
They just want us to think they don't know how to make fake moon dust. :)
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
It's quite abundant, and I'm sure there are some places in the Phillipines or maybe even our own Mt. St. Helens area where they've still got excess and would be happy to get rid of it. If that doesn't fit the bill, how hard is it to find rocks of the same composition as the moon, and grind them up?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
With the gravity being different, the mechanics won't fit, whether or not the dust is moon-like or not.
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
And it's got a degree.
From what I've seen from lunar landing footage and descriptions of the lunar surface, I have about a pound of material that would make a great substitute. It's caked on my video card and motherboard inside my computer case. I'll just scoop it up into a ziplock back and mail it to NASA. Perhaps if the other two million Slashdot readers can empty theirs as well, they would have enough to complete their mission. Where should we mail this stuff to?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Wallace: Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!
[Looks at "Cheese Holidays" magazine, then out window]
Wallace: Everybody knows the moon is made of cheese...
NASA should just save money by scaling the sets down a bit - Oh damn I almost forgot....it might take a while to make some more sets! NASA could just import some moon dust instead!
Are they really looking for fake moon sand? I mean, they're probably planning to shoot a fake mars landing. Is fake moon sand really what they need? Does it looks the same as mars sand?
Whoever gets this contract, I bet NASA ends up paying $100,000 a ton for dirt.
they made those confy tempurpedic matresses, how hard is it to make dirt.. i mean god supposably made dirt, why cant they?
If you are going to simule an enviorment with different gravity, just change the size and/or time scale of everything.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Why not just use whatever they used for those famously faked moon landings?
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Dust and dirt from Earth have generally been exposed to natural erosion forces that round off the corners from the rock fragments. The stuff coming from the Moon has not experienced equivalent weathering, and so it is much more abrasive than one might expect. As NASA begins to design new lunar equipment, it needs to test just how the prototypes will hold up to the Moon's "environment."
You're not going to cure the apathy of us 18-25 year olds with fake pot. I'm telling you, we're better than that, we are the myspace generation!
Wait a minute..fake moondust will do just fine.
If I hear another "fake moon landing" joke, I think I might kill myself. Seriously folks, it's an old joke and isn't funny the 100th time it is posted for the same story ...
Let them use the huge supply there...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
could supply tons of baby powder quite easily...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
and as you have the only lucid post here for me to ask this of..
when you are building equipment to test moving multiple cubic meteres of solids, and you wanna be so precise that you are mucking up composition and particle sizes-
won't one of the big factors be the weight per given volume- and won't that be drastically different on the lunar surface than anything earthbound?
i.e. to build a 'earthmover' (regolithmover?) able to tunnel straight down a 2X2 meter sharft and remove the remainder straight up-- might be different enough under lunar pull that all the tests are useless to begin with..
how about making cement under reduced gravity- the tensile strength results will be all wrong if the heavier particles don't have as much gravity to pull them to the bottom of the slab.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
...redundant, as I just made the 8th comment on fake lunar landings (this one).
What I want to know is when they are going to start having fake Nascar? Pretty much
the same demographic as wrestling, isn't it? Imagine the crashes you could have!
Because we (the iPod Generation) are indifferent to space exploration.
Then where will Belldandy and her sisters get their bracelets?
Someone's got to be selling fake moon dust on ebay.
If not, does this mean that it is legal to sell fake moon dust?
I would like to point out that when I made that comment, there were NO OTHER COMMENTS on this story.
Thank you.
Are they going to fake the low gravity environment too? Seriously.
Did not RTFA
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I dont know if it helps, but I can supply NASA with as much fake fake moondust as they like :0
I seem to remember from history class that you sucessfully landed on the moon six times. I remember watching the little moon buggies roaming the surface and people playing golf. I'd go in a heartbeat if it wasn't for the whole motion sickness and sucking at math thing.
Yet now I'm supposed to believe you don't have the know-how from those six succesful tests to build a new rover or even a stationary habitat? Did no-one have the foresight to keep the original plans that you now have to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions (that could be spent sending people to the moon) on special fake moon dirt so you can spend untold billions to start the R&D process over again?
I mean let's face it. Outside of upgrades using new energy efficient technology and lighter materials, the design probably isn't going to change much from what was used in the original lunar missions.
What I find funny about the whole thing is the orignal test vehicles are *still* there! From what I remember, all the equipment was left behind to make room for the samples that were brought back. (Yes, the fuel requirements for the return trip played into it as well.) So you have SIX rovers just sitting there, pristine and untouched as if you left them there yesterday.
Why not just build a launch vehicle, or did you loose the plans for the Saturn V's too? Send a couple of people up there with replacement batteries, drive the crap out of it so it gets really dirty, then shrink wrap the whole thing for the trip home. They shouldn't be too hard to find, it's right where you parked it.
You'll save lots of time and probably money by cutting out the endless inane tests with pseudo material hoping you're right. Just go get the test vehicle that's already been exposed and guarantee you are right.
Why don't they just use whatever they used 35 years ago?
I find this very remarkable to read. In the sixties we were able to send a team to the moon (July 16th 1969) just 7 years after the famous "We choose to go to the Moon" speech by John F. Kennedy (September 12th 1962). That is: building things from scratch in a time where computers had the size of rooms and the calculating capacity of an everage wristwatch and we had no knowledge of space travel.
And now, with all the knowledge of spacetravel, simulation software, computing power, smart people and a few bags of fake moondust we take 5 years just to reverse engineer the software?
Why?
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
Bye......
Nice knowing you.
I read a news story last year--I think it was in the "Dallas Morning News"--that was about the need for more lunar simulant, but it mentioned a researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas. I actually made a few trips to UTD to talk with this guy. I considered for a while the possibility of starting a small company to produce lunar simulant, but I eventually decided that it is out of my means.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
They actually plan to cut cocaine with it and sell it to schoolchildren. Spacecraft aren't cheap, you know. Have to raise the money somehow.
... and then they built the supercollider.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmpnfL5PCw
True, WWE is worked (scripted), where shooting is discouraged (spontaneous action). But collegiate wrestling and Olympic wrestling have always been a "shoot". Some other professional wrestling leagues are unscripted; these include Real Pro Wrestling and Pancrase, as well as the mixed martial arts leagues. See also Shoot wrestling.
My Kids got Moon Sand from Santa .
I suppose that Santa has more Contacts with the Man in the Moon than NASA does .
http://www.spinmaster.com/products/moonSand/
MAP has all of the characteristics of moon dust: abrasive, corrodes electrical equipment and is very irritating to the respiratory system. Mix with fine volcanic desert sand and, voilà, moon dust.
Duplication of its abrasive nature aside, perhaps they could collect tons of playa dust. Send NASA to Burning Man. Awesome. Surely those moon buggies and space suits would be welcomed!
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
... and this is precisely why NASA has a budget problem. You thought parking was expensive in Manhattan?!
"fake moon dust"? ok, thats all we need, some ammo for the conspiracy theorists who think we never made it to the moon in the first place. or better yet, shades of "Capricorn One" (A sci-fi suspense movie where it was claimed that NASA and the government staged a mars landing).
Understanding is much like a 3-edged-sword. in this: there are always 2 sides and the truth.