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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)."
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
Problem is, you're right - Nobody had the foresight to keep the original plans and now we have to start over. Only 30 years after the missions were flown, with most of the crews still alive and examples of the spacecraft intact, we have thrown away enough of the documentation to make recreating the missions a major undertaking.
I'm part of a research project that is working on re-implementing the Apollo project with a software simulation. We have a guidance computer emulator that runs the original guidance software (unmodified) in a model of the original ship. But that's only 2 of the 4 computers we need to fly a mission. The software for the actual Saturn booster was destroyed when IBM Federal Systems division ceased to exist. (MIT and TRW who built the other computers kept their source code, and we have it.) We're having lots of trouble finding even design docuents for the flown versions. Right now, after almost 5 years of continuous work, we are -almost- to the point where we can fly an Apollo 7 mission. (CSM test in Earth orbit). And that's just a SOFTWARE implementation, we aren't having to fabricate parts or anything. Lots of the systems-level documentation was lost and must be recreated from schematic diagrams, and little in the way of preflight planning documents exists anymore. We're making progress though. Right now the last major command-module-computer problem we think we have is telling the command module computer how to find the moon. It uses a time reference that nobody bothered to document, and must be recreated by reverse engineering. We've also never found any manuals related to the mission control operations room and their controls and displays.