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Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon
CryogenicKeen writes with the news that a University of Michigan study indicates the perfect place to monitor Earth's climate system would be the surface of the moon. The side facing us is a perfect location to monitor temperatures and weather patterns here on our planet, and a UM paper proposes an international effort to deploy monitoring stations on Earth's natural satellite. "On the near side of the airless moon, where Apollo 15 landed, surface temperature is controlled by solar radiation during daytime and energy radiated from Earth at night. Huang showed that due to an amplifying effect, even weak radiation from Earth produces measurable temperature changes in the regolith. Further, his revisit of the data revealed distinctly different characteristics in daytime and nighttime lunar surface temperature variations. This allowed him to uncover a lunar night-time warming trend from mid-1972 to late 1975, which was consistent with a global dimming of Earth that occurred over the same period and was due to a general decrease of sunlight over land surfaces."
Sounds really expensive, isn't there some way to use the money better or do we really need all that new data? We could, like sped the money on CO2 reductions or developing green technology.
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Is the moon the closest to earth you can get before your science is distorted by politics?
IOU one (1) signature
He's proving a correlation, which means that knowing what happened, he found clues that it would...
How can he be so sure that if we gather the clues, we'll come to the right conclusion? We have lots of data about climate, so much we usually can't tell what will happen, how is this different? Is it really that tied to radiation? Couldn't we measure radiation straight in the atmosphere? Do we already do so? Can we take multiple measurements to isolate local conditions?
Putting stuff on the moon is a romantic notion that appeals to a lot of people, but we should keep it as a last resort.
of the moon....
We've had this baby ready to launch for years, but for some mysterious reason NASA is having trouble doing anything with climate research. All they need to do is strap it on a DELTA IV rocket.
I'm in favor of lunar development, but this seems kind of pointless. Wouldn't it make more sense to put the insturments in a polar orbit so they'd be closer and get more accurate readings? Heck, even a geosynch orbit is vastly closer than on the moon.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Sending robots to do this kind of work makes much more sense than sending humans, a monitoring station could be fully automated much easier than a human could be put on the moon again.
...to remotely measure the temperature changes in the regolith from the earth to observe the earth's climate. Repeat until stack overflow.
We could just use satellites, which we've gotten pretty good at.
If anyone uses the phrase "Dark Side of the Moon", or "Light Side of the moon" I will punch them in the face. If they defend that by saying it's a "figure of speech", I'll rip their head of. Just so you know.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Sophisticated weapon developed by Dr Alan Parsons.......
Would they be looking especially for lunar cooling at "night" on the moon? Because it has no atmosphere and no sunlight when dark, they say that the temperature of the side nearest the Earth is controlled by radiation from Earth. Would that mean global warming would cause it to be cooler, since the greenhouse effect causes that radiation to be reflected back to Earth?
Yeah it's flamebait, offtopic, and even at -100 it would still be overrated but come on, the subject is the MOON for chrissakes!
+1 funny -MAXNUMBER flamebaint etc.
Isn't the moon getting smacked around by asteroids on a fairly regular basis (hence all those impact craters)? How long is a "permanent" installation really going to last? I know I must be missing something... Right?
Like any other good remote automated weather station (think AWOS), there should be a phone number to dial into, so that pilots could check the local weather, as well as a VHF station for in-flight use. I can imagine the data now:
000:00:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:01:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:02:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:03:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:04:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet, caution extreme radiation warning
From dictionary.com, dark can mean "hidden; secret."
Until the space age, that's exactly what the non-Earth-facing side of the moon was: hidden from view.
I admit it is a bit confusing when any given part of what was once the "dark side of the moon" spends half of each orbit in bright sunlight.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You are correct that it would be very expensive, if you had a mission to the moon with this as the sole goal of the entire mission. So they should talk to India about including this as part of India's moon shots. I assume India wants to land on the Earth facing side, too, so this could ride down along with the robot from a few articles ago.
from which to measure and study so called global warming. Or more accurately, solar radiation fluctuations and its effects on its satellites (the moon and earth).
The overwhelming arrogance of some people to believe that mere humans and our assorted activities have a major impact on the (average) mass of the atmosphere of about 5,000 trillion metric tons, is astounding in the extreme. A single volcanic eruption spews more "greenhouse gases" and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activity for a decade. And yet the worst that happens (globally)are beautiful sunsets for a couple of years then its gone.
The most logical and common sense reason for climate temperature variations is that great, bright, flaming ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky. Which, by the way, is known to be variable in its output. So putting a sensor array on the moon, away from the influence of human activities , will finally settle this matter once and for all, so we can get on with more important matters. Like fair taxes http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer, or ending genocide http://www.savedarfur.org/content?splash=yes, or who will be the next "American Idol". Oh, and if you really want to reduce CO2 emissions, plant a few trees or flowers, they love the stuff.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It'll be for more than weather monitoring. With a station on the moon you can use HAARP technology, spy cameras, test new manufacturing processes, research probable mining locations, test habitations, refueling depots, 'defensive' installations, and on and on and on. Despite being very expensive, with all of that such a station would be highly profitable.
Bush will fund it if it can report to him "weather" a given American is voting Republican properly or not.
--
make install -not war
I would suggest, in addition to watching the Earth for climate change, that we also watch other planets. I've read recently that some research points to part of the climate change problem being the sun itself. Why don't we send weather monitoring stations to Mars as well, and see if the temperature is rising on other planets?
If we're going to monitor our own planet, we should have some objective evidence from other planets as well.
Will it be constructed in cooperation with the inhabitants of Zeta Reticuli?
This has been discussed here. The moon is not the right place to do this. (why should it be down in another gravity well?) The right place is where DSCOVR aka Triana is to be placed.
The location for that is L1 (Lagrange-1), the neutral gravity point between the Sun and the Earth. That location will always view a sunlight earth.
FYI, one reason that Triana was not actually launched was that it was proposed by vice president at the time Al Gore. (Some wanted to call it GoreSat)
Why did they have to go all the way to the moon in order to propose a climate monitoring station? Besides, where would be put such a station?
Dangling modifiers, anyone?
Sig free's the way to be.
If you really need to be at the lunar distance to monitor climate you should station the instruments at L4 and L5. It takes a lot less energy deploy instruments there than landing on the moon. Solar eclipses are less frequent, etc. You would think that the scientist would have had this figured out before he went public.
an ill wind that blows no good
"Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon"
Bob: "How's the climate looking today?"
Fred: "Yup... still a vacuum."
for such primitive tools on the moon.
advanced beyond your wildest dreams, bitches
your three dimensions for such a station are cute. err, tell them how many dimensions we have on the moon.
five
yes
hundred
thank you, err.
Monitoring climate change is important, but solving it even more important. As plants are natural consumers of CO2, they could help us a bit. We would probably need lots of space to control the current CO2 levels by planting trees, so I am wondering whether we could genetically modify some plants, preferably phytoplankton, to consume CO2 very rapidly. Then we could just throw some of them in every ocean and let them feed on our CO2 emmissions. Our problem then would be to find what to do with the excess oxygen.
Three meters!!! It's much!!! How much power need it to drill it? >5000 Watts with much O2?
Is it as the architects and workers were drilling the terrain to verify the hardness of the ground? Like the buildings jobs!
How hard it is the ground at the time of excavating, perforating, digging? Is it that want the top-secret military researchers like of the C.I.A.?
Do they want to research the quality of regolith for fueling use?
Few weeks ago, there was a competition of a robot that collects regolith in slashdot
They want a top-secret camouflaged station like a control tower of monitoring & vigilance:
- It's an USA spacecraft : PASS!.
- It's an USA spacecraft : PASS!.
- It's a non-USA spacecraft : alarm! alarm! alarm! Kill it? [yes/no] Autodestruct the base? [yes/no].
It can be a long-time control tower of communications on the Moon too! With its High Gain big antenna 32 GHz to communicate to the Earth, and to communicate for those slaves on the Moon. It reserves the maximum (claimed?) range of frequencies spectrums! Many GHz and Mbits/s of meaningful data!!!.A control tower with many top-secret cameras to control who come in to our top-secret territory (claimed), our spaceship, our platform, our station,
I don't use solar panels, i use top-secret atomic energy for full uptime of many accelerated operations of many short-time (and long-time) missions.
Our global future objetive for our USA flag: our future colonization for us, America brave!
Cars do get reused. Every used or "program" car on the lot is a reused car.
Whether cars get recycled when they cease to work depends on who has them. Some cars go to junkyards that sell car parts, and parts of those cars get recycled. I imagine cars that are simply compacted into one square mesh of steel and glass usually aren't.
Recycling car batteries is not common these days, esp. since they're sealing the batteries. Those go directly to hazardous waste dumps, do not pass go, collect new battery from auto parts store. If they don't get treated that way, they could get as bad for the environment as burnt gasoline.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
I hope they're careful with any nuclear material they might be moving around up there. I'd miss the moon if it were blasted away from Earth's orbit.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There is a dark side of the moon, and a light side of the moon.
The dark side is the side facing away from the sun. It shifts constantly.
La la la, dark side of the moon. I can't see the dark side of the moon. That's because the moon is right about full at the moment.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Just a minor correction...
The 7.303 billion tons is carbon, not CO2. CO2 has those extra 2 oxygen atoms that makes it about 3.67 times heavier, so 7.303 billion tons of carbon is 26.8 billion tons of CO2. Changes your numbers a bit.
Energy: time to change the picture.