Slashdot Mirror
Japan Moon Probe Snaps First Photos
mrcgran writes "Space.com reports, "Almost one month after Japan's successful launch of the Kaguya lunar probe, the unmanned observatory has begun its first major activities in orbit around the moon. In addition to snapping its first lunar images, the probe jettisoned one of two 110-pound (50-kilogram) "baby" satellites that will help create a detailed gravity map of the moon." The major objectives of the "KAGUYA" mission are to obtain scientific data of the lunar origin and evolution and to develop the technology for the future lunar exploration. "KAGUYA" consists of a main orbiting satellite at about 100km altitude and two small satellites (Relay Satellite and VRAD Satellite) in polar orbit."
I, for one, am sick to death of welcoming 50 kilogram robotic overlord after 50 kilogram robotic overlord, only to have them fly off to the moon after a month or so, leaving us high, dry, and overlordless back here on Earth!
John
More user friendly version here: http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/index_e.htm
Can't we all just get along
Nothing like a freaking high gain antenna smack-dab in the middle of every freaking shot.
How long will it be before Japan insists on being allowed to maintain an offensive military?
With China on its border, and the US treating it as a sock puppet, Japan must be looking for ways to reassert the Imperial power they once possessed. They are developing high powered fighter jets, and advanced space technology that has obvious military implications, plus they control a vast amount of US debt. Meanwhile we are just complacently buying cheap cars and sending all the wealth our forefathers gave their blood, sweat, and tears (well, not much crying in that generation) to earn.
Can we trust them? They were really friendly once we started glassing their cities, but once they have the power to return the favor, old nationalist sentiment is sure to follow.
_____
Thank you.
That's supposed to be the tripod, I believe someone got fired...
welcome our Japanese mooninite overlords.
What about the buggy thingamees that they left up there? And the coke can. I jest, but seriously folks, I want to see if these conspiracy theories can be put to rest for good. Can they photograph the equipment left behind?
....did they find our fake moon landing set yet?
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Perhaps the Japanese can provide some unbiased evidence of the (alleged?) moon landing site. Put those pesky theories to rest...
...SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS!
I believe that Japan should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do. Come on, now. That "imperialist" thing is bullshit. How could anybody see what the US is doing and call Japan "imperialist"? I believe that a nation should be able to do whatever the hell they want as far as cosmological exploration goes.
Is there also an air of nerdy excitement about this new-sorta "Space Race II" (new character... Asia!) in the rest of you guys too?
What about the buggy thingamees that they left up there?
Everything left on the moon worked perfectly! (That slapping sound you hear is a horde of retired NASA engineers throwing down gauntlets)
I want to see if these conspiracy theories can be put to rest for good. Can they photograph the equipment left behind?
These are people who don't accept the existing film, photographs, hunks of moon rock, etc, as evidence; more photos won't make a scrap of difference. The only way to refute conspiracy theorists is to take them to the moon and push them out an airlock without a space suit so they can experience the low gravity and hard vaccuum first hand (and even then they'd probably use their last breath attempting to argue that it couldn't have been done in the 1960's...).
Blank until
Was somebody arguing otherwise?
Princess Kaguya is the traditional main character in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. She's something of a Japanese 'Tom Thumb'.
Kaguya is a golden-haired princess sent to the Earth from her Moon kingdom to learn about the joys and sadness of life. In various versions of the tale, she's required to return to the moon once she reaches adulthood.
Anime fans will note that the 'Moon Princess' motif is used repeatedly in modern stories, such as 'Sailor Moon', 'Mammotte Syugogetten' and more recently, 'Oh, Edo Rocket!'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
What is savage word? Why must we always have stories about what some barbaric race is doing?
Meanwhile, the Linux server marketshare has dropped 20% in the last quarter and no stories on that...
These pictures are fairly low quality, probably from an engineering camera rather than a scientific one.
One thing I noticed on the website is that they also carry an HDTV camera! Can't wait to see some nice HD video from lunar orbit.
This is when we find the monolith.
*This post brought to you buy me FINALY finding the stupid javaascript shit with the reply button.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I wonder how long it will take them to find TMA1
Yes but if you took them all you could end the argument. I vote ship two we load up with middle management types and phone sanitizers.
At first I read that as "Japanese moon probe snaps: first photos"
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I wonder if they are planning on taking a closer look at the backside. Look it up, seriously.
There is simply too much glass..
Don't a handful of the Toho rubber-suit-monster movies start with a Japanese space launch getting the attention of unfriendly aliens?
Start a happiness pandemic
President Truman: Get this saucer to Area 51.
General: But that's where we're building the set for the fake moon landing.
President Truman: Then we'll have to really land on the moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies.
A very, very long time on a gravity map - they'd need a MAGNETIC plot. Remember, TMA1 stands for "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly - One" thats how they found it.
Of course the gravity map *might* find the buried Atlantean spaceship because of its mini-blackhole power source, but I doubt it....
When they snap the Apollo landing sites and see two sets of footprints leaving the capsule..
..and three returning that you need to start worrying.
Nah, I'm no so amused about the landing site, it's the enormous "Kilroy was here" on the darkside of the moon I'm wait for....
What! You want us to die from a virulent disease from a dirty telephone????
Geez the nerve of some people!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
There are very few countries I would trust in a foxhole, and only one of them doesn't speak English as the national language. That one is Japan. Japan is so intimately tied with the United States politically, economically, and culturally that to suggest that Japanese rearmament (a frog that has LONG since boiled -- they now have something like the world's 5th largest military) leads to military conflict with the United States is like suggesting that Canada is planning to continue the War of 1812 grudge match at the first provocation.
In some bizzaro world where Japan and the United States had economic hostilities (as opposed to the odd disagreement among friends over import levels, tariffs, and the like), Japan cutting off trade with the US would ruin the nation in a matter of months. (And that is assuming we didn't respond by having the Navy cut off their oil supply, in which case she would quite literally cease to have a modern economy in a matter of weeks.) That is the flipside of them being economically dependent on exports to America and their other overseas markets.
Additionally, debt is a weapon that goes both ways. There is a nice expression -- "When you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. When you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank." The economic nuclear option for the United States is having a midlevel Treasury functionary say one catastrophically important sentence: "We will not pay interest on the T-bills held by the Japanese government, or anyone they should sell them to, for the duration of the hostilities." Oh, we owed you a trillion dollars? Sorry, our mistake -- the accountant has been fired.
That is a heck of a lot more important with regards to China than it is to Japan, by the way. I really don't mind China investing their profits in the US debt (*somebody* is going to own it, who cares who) -- should they decide to have an attack of stupid and talk about nuking Los Angeles again, we can just threaten them with causing a financial panic on a scale unheard of in history. All of the devastation with many less bodies than threatening to match them in megadeaths.
I call this the economic nuclear option because it would NOT be consequence free -- it would pretty much guarantee a worldwide financial panic. But, hey, if you're talking about a major conflict between two of the richest nations in the world the worldwide financial panic is a given.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
To be fair to the plan, death by dirty telephone is only a possibility, while ridding ourselves of middle management is guaranteed.
Worth the risk, IMO.
Blank until
Why do we need these pictures anyway. Everyone knows that when you get close enough, you will find out the moon is made of cheese.
Geez, nothing but pictures of itself! Should have named it PRINCESS.
I wonder what the speed of that little thing is. I noticed that the moon just about doubled in apparent size in the space of twenty minutes, according to the comments under the photos.
--
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
>Is there also an air of nerdy excitement about this new-sorta "Space Race II"
>(new character... Asia!) in the rest of you guys too?
Yes, but also I have this nagging fear that we won't be able to dominate like we used to. We're lazier and more expensive than we used to be.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
WWIV. Ah, the good old days. :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"That's no moon..."
Meta will eat itself
I say this to all your things, for this is a robbery.
That *this* is the ministry in charge of Gundam.
I, for one, would like to see third-party pictures of the landing site.
I trust the Japanese to supply me with all my high-tech components -- my auto, cameras, etc. Frankly, I trust them more than I do my own government.
JAXA to Kaguya ni omedetou gozaimasu!
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
The resolution will be 10 meters per pixel. That's not good enough to see the lander bases from apollo, let alone any footprints.
wiki article (look for the data on the Terrain Camera)
I REQUIRE MORE MINERALS.
However, my VESPIAN GAS stores are UNSTOPPABLE.
Lets see if they announce or show images of the moon structures that NASA found long time ago.
The Japanese have a lot more incentive to colonize the moon.. They have a serious overcrowding thing going on in their cities. Creating Lunar colonies might be a good way to free up some space by shipping people to the moon for extended work programs or even living. Of course, I imagine the prolonged exposure to less gravity might be an issue for a return, but put that in the fine print! I can't wait to vacation at Disney's Moon Adventure!
...to bad the Americans only care about conquest of the middle east and ethnic cleansing of Muslims so their god will be happy.
a glitch in human reasoning
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
The name is a mythological Moon Princess. Or something like that.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
A Ridiculous Liberal Myth!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I read it as "So, Pope John's tampon sops brainfart"
They have a serious overcrowding thing going on in their cities
It wont be as bad in a generation or two.
Well, that and Mars (MER), Jupiter and its moons (New Horizons), Pluto (New Horizons), Saturn (Cassini), the Heliopause (Voyager), and incidentally the Moon (Orion), right?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
heh! I think that's the first IN SOVIET RUSSIA joke that actually means something. The USA landing on the Moon first pretty much won the space race. The Soviet Union had a decent (if careless and hasty) space program, but failing to reach the Moon before the Americans was a big blow to their image.
sudo eat my shorts
>>I wonder if they are planning on taking a closer look at the backside.
/. ?
Don't you read
This was extensively covered in last week's discussion on the mission to Uranus.
.
- aqk
F U
Odd, I thought you could see various human light sources over the face of the earth at night, but this shot seems totally dark.
Perhaps that is only when up closer as this shot is pretty far from earth. I can't remember where I saw images showing all the night time light, but it was neat looking, and so is this image.
Speaking of this distance to resolution problem, and no I'm not trying to pull a moon landing hoax, but it would be nice to see some shots of the landing site from this probe if possible, specifically because it is non-US.