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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.
Apparently, tons of them, mainly for working on technologies for diggers and wheels and machinery on the surface.
You must be new here....
and some one moded them all "Redundent"...
including the first one, wich leads me to think the mod agrees and is simply saying those posts are "no, duh" type posts.
cmon, its a joke, laugh!
(admitedly I was going to make a fake moon landing joke as well, but as it has already been beaten into the ground, I am gona have to pass, wich obviously opens me up to a "you must be new here" comment, and shortly there after we should see a "In soviet russi, moon dust fakes you!", and a "I for one welcome our new fake-moondust-overlords". Oh, and don't for get the "I make fake moon dust you insensitive clod!")
sigh....
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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.
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
And, um, I made it 7.
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.
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
would that be fine enough though. The stuff they need would need to be the same as material that had been pounded by meteorites for billions of years and irradiated for that long too.
Wasn't it found to be very fine and thus 'sticky'.
I suspect some heavy industrial processing would be required to replicate it. However, without the same gravitational field it would behave differently anyhow, so a less accurate analogue would likely suffice.
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"?
If the lunar surface is primarily aluminum oxide of some form (not that it is, but that sounds kind of right) then is will be both durable and abrasive. If testing is required to determine life expectancies of both operating equipment and excavation/drilling machinery then they will need to replicate both the particle size, distribution (in terms of seive percentages) and durability/hardness.
Excuse me...I need to go start my RFP paperwork...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
Whoever gets this contract, I bet NASA ends up paying $100,000 a ton for dirt.
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.
NASA needs hundreds of gallons of reddish-orange dye
mod me funny
Because we (the iPod Generation) are indifferent to space exploration.
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.
Bye......
Nice knowing you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmpnfL5PCw