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Moon Rocks Still In Demand After Almost 40 Years
During NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, roughly 842 pounds of rocks were collected from the lunar surface. Scientific demand for the rocks has always been high, and a review board tracks and sends out hundreds of samples each year, even now, decades after the rocks were brought to Earth. They've provided researchers with a wealth of information about the entire solar system. From the NYTimes:
"The samples have confirmed that asteroid and meteor impacts, not volcanism, created the vast majority of craters that define the Moon's topography, while a constant barrage of meteorites, micrometeorites and radiation melted and pureed the bedrock to create the blanket of fine-grained soil and dust -- known as regolith -- that now cloaks the lunar surface. And knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years, has enabled scientists to establish a baseline that allows them to date geologic features throughout the solar system. The surface of the Earth, one of the solar system's youngest topographies, is constantly changing, as it is faulted, folded, shaped and reshaped by eruptions, earthquakes and erosion. By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets."
Too bad they're all fakes picked up from the driveway outside a soundstage in southern california. All those so called "scientists" and "NASA" will look so silly once people actually make it to the moon and find that it really is made of cheese. Demand for the gourmet "moon cheese" will cause overmining of the moon and an eventual orbital shift sometime in 2012 which will cause all female mammals on earth to have a massively synchronized ovulatory cycle which will end with the death of all the males.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
You might want to look up "plate tectonics".
It's not rock... it's fossilized whalebone.
No idea about the Smithsonian, but I've already seen Mars rock - at the Natural History Museum in London.
Bits blasted off Mars in some titanic collision aeons in the past, which have drifted through space before falling to Earth as meteorites. Bit of a roundabout route, but it works!
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I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Tucked away in a tiny corner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, ignored by most visitors, is a small display of a tiny rock.
You can touch this rock.
The description of the rock states that it is a meteorite from Mars that was collected in Antarctica.
I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Stop doing that.
You'll go blind.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Stop doing that. You'll go blind.
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Or gain superpowers!
"By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets.""
So true. Even when John McCain was a kid, he could look up in the night sky and see the moon.
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Can we send a probe to drill for soil? Sure.
No Blood For Soil!
I worked in the photo labs at Johnson Space Center (Nasa Houston) back in 1972 and was told that when Apollo 11 returned, Nasa had the Lunar Receiving Laboratory set up like a Fort Dietrich style germ warfare lab. Apparently there was actually concern that the rocks could harbor harmful microbes. This may have all been an urban legend of the time - I'm not sure. In any case, the photo techs thought this was pretty funny, since the boxes that the Hasselblad film cassettes were returned in were full of moon dust and it stuck to everything.
Hubble cost about $2.5 billion to build and launch.
The Shuttle costs $1.3 billion per launch at the rate of ~7 launches a year.
If there were no manned space program, NASA could've easily afforded to build and put a dozen HSTs in orbit.
The question isn't what can do the job better, the question is what can do the job most efficiently: i.e. effectiveness / cost. An unmanned Mars mission designed to return samples would probably also need to return a hundred kg in support equipment. A manned Mars mission would probably need to return several tons of equipment, people, and active life support equipment. Fuel requirements scale proportionately to payload weight so you've just increased the mission cost by one if not two orders of magnitude. Sure a person could do the job better, but is it really worth paying 10x-100x more for something a little better?
At this point in time, putting people in space is mostly a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire the population (or at least give them a sense of superiority over other nations). As much as we want the romantic notion of people traveling to the other planets, the technology just isn't there yet. Should we continue pouring most of our money into inflated mission costs just so we can say we have people up there? Or should we concentrate our money on cost-effectively experimenting and improving technology which could eventually be used to get people out to the planets and stars?
Nobody wants to kill off manned space travel. The goal of even an unmanned space program is to pave the way for people eventually going out there. What the anti-manned program people want is an increased emphasis on cost-effective research and experimental technology, and less on symbolic gestures. IMHO there is substantial PR value in having some sort of manned space program. A lot of people working in astronautics and the space program today wouldn't be there if there hadn't been a manned program that inspired them as a kid. But the NASA budget currently 3:1 in favor of manned space travel needs to swing the other way if we're really serious about developing space travel technology.
It's a matter of scale. When you're dealing with 4-5 billion years, what's 20 million years? 0.5% error margin sounds quite good to me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.