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Protecting the Apollo Landing Sites From Later Landings
R3d M3rcury writes "The Lunar X-Prize is a contest offering $20 million to the first private organization to land and maneuver a robotic rover on the moon. There is also a $1 million bonus to anyone who can get a picture of a man-made object on the moon. But one archeologist believes that 'The sites of early lunar landings are of unparalleled significance in the history of humanity, and extraordinary caution should be taken to protect them.' He's concerned that we may end up with rover tracks destroying historic artifacts, such as Neil Armstrong's first bootprint, or that a mistake could send a rocket slamming into a landing site. He calls on the organizers to ban any contestant from landing within 100KM of a prior moon landing site. Now he seems to think this just means Apollo. What about the Luna and Surveyor landers? What about the Lunokhod rovers? Are they fair game?"
We have a picture of it right? Seriously what if every time somebody did something new that spot was forbidden to be stepped on again? asinine. What if nobody as allowed to visit the beach of Columbus's first landing sites? BFD, send a plaque or something and stop wasting your time worrying about whether a footprint is going to disappear someday. It will.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Heating and cooling once a month would expand and contract the soil, obliterating footprints eventually.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
How many places would remain if all those spots are banned? There are only so much good landing sites on the Moon.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Erosion has probably already destroyed the first footsteps on the Moon.
it will darn near be just as special as the first time. it's been SO long since we've been there, in person.
the next footprint should be just as protected.
These sort of contests work wonders towards inspiring new ideas and breaking away from old paradigms. In a free(ish) economy the main motivation is money. If you set out a prize for various pinnacles of innovation, then it is just a matter of time before they will be captured. If the goal is not achieved, then set the bounty higher. I love this idea for one and wish any attempts to gain the prize well! Break free from NASA's model, but don't step on the lunar dirt prints!
And keeping people away from the original "landing site" will keep them from figuring out that the first moon landing was faked by the government. (Or was it faked by our evil reptilian overlords? I can never keep that straight.)
I remember reading long ago, forget where, that official CCP policy was that if they were to arrive on the moon before the US returned, their first goal was to remove as much evidence of American landing sites as possible so as to claim the US had lied and in fact China was the first on the moon.
Probably some wharrgarbl from the intertubes stuck in my head, but who knows.
Great, now we'll need to deal with the lunar version of NIMBYs. I was personally looking forward to Hydrogen 3 and titanium surface mining on the Moon. I want vast robotic factories on the Moon so we can start mass producing segments for cylinder-type space colonies. I want to be able to retire in one of those space colonies.
It is a shame that some people exist merely to hold the rest of us back from our ideal Star Trek future with green alien babes.
I can't imagine the bootprint lasting long if North Korea make it up there.
You think those were nuclear missiles they were firing? North Korea are planning the worlds first single stage rocket 'landing' on the moon, with their great leader strapped to the front because he is so awesome he can actually reduce drag.
Task Mangler
"The sites of early lunar landings are of unparalleled significance in the history of humanity, and extraordinary caution should be taken to PREVENT EVER BEING ABLE TO PROVE THEY EVEN EXIST"
This is ridiculous idolatry. It's not like there is something we *don't* know about these events, there is nothing to discover there, and hence nothing to protect, as opposed to an archeological site.
The first bootprint was likely obliterated by the lunar ascent engine exhaust on the way out. Hello!
Why not? I personally think that preserving the artifacts of the first moon landing should be considered important.
Though realistically.... Neil Armstrong's first boot print was most likely obliterated when the LEM blasted off.
There's a lot of moon up there. I see no reason to disturb the existing landing sites until we have the means to preserve them properly.
So, do you feel the same about Bletchley Park? It's not a simple question. There ARE things we sometimes like to see preserved for the awe inspiring value they have for posterity. I don't know about all the sites on the moon but I'd vote for the first landing site of anything ever (Russian?) and the spot where a human being first walked.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
whether a footprint is going to disappear someday. It will
If it hasn't been already destroyed. Wasn't the photo of where he first stepped on the moon next to the lander? Wouldn't the lander module have toasted the ground around it when it fired it's engines up to re-enter lunar orbit?
Of course, what is the point of preserving a site that nobody can really go to anyway? Sure, if someone went there, they could 'ruin' the artifacts that remain, but who cares? It's not like anyone can visit the site and appreciate it. The best you could hope for would be to preserve it for future generations' camera equipped robotic lunar rovers.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Between now and the 2012 deadline we're likely to hear more and more of the developments and adventures or the various GLXP teams.
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams
A more appropriate question is of all the GLXP teams, how many will actually get to the point of getting off the ground and doing a successful Trans Lunar Injection, and of that number, how many are actually going to attempt to meet the "imaging man made artefacts" criteria.
Official GLXP team; White Label Space has recently written of it's Lunar landing intentions and the focus seems to be more on finding water (another bonus) than finding Apollo, Lunokhod, Surveyor et al. They're considering the peaks of eternal light near the Moon's south pole which would also provide nearby landing sites with rover routes into the permanently shadowed zones.
http://www.whitelabelspace.com/2009/05/preliminary-landing-site-considerations.html
I hope that I'm not the only one that is fed up with this modern approach to trying to preserve everything we ever do. Why can't we be happy with the knowledge that we did it? If I got a chance to see the first boot print on the moon I'd jump at it but would my life be any worse if that boot print accidentally got driven over, hardly. I'm not advocating that we should go out of our way to erase history just let it take care of itself.
I'd bet that 99.999% of the population probably didn't even realize that there was a first boot print still up there and now they will get all up in arms because it might at some point in the future get erased. Sigh. Give me a solution to world hunger, fusion power and a decent internet connection first and then I'll care.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
After all we explore wrecks on the ocean floors, the landers should be afforded the same status for scientific investigation.
As it is, We've still got Neil's boot, so we can make more footprints anytime.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I hope you remembered to tell your children, not to do as I have done ?
Me, I've got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train. The train left 5 minutes ago, and now I have a severe crotch pain.
Thankfully, my mother is a tailor, and will be able to sew my ripped blue jeans. As for Father, he's either in a gambling house, or lying on top of a drunk (always confused me too, but listen to the original lyrics .. he does say "the only time he's satisfied is when he's *on* a drunk".
... as long as there are people living without access to electricity of telephone.
Or cars, while people without legs are forced to use wheelchairs.
Or refined sugar and flour because you waste energy and pollute the environment just so richer people could have better tasting but less healthy food.
Heck... having two perfectly working kidneys is immoral as long as there is at least one person in the world strapped to a dialysis machine somewhere.
Blood is immoral too... people bleed to death constantly. CON-STAN-TLY!!! Like, right now!
Breathing? Fucking hell yeah it is immoral! And rude to all those people that drowned on the Titanic. When you breathe - you embellish their memory and all that they have ever achieved.
Existing? Well, naturally! By your very existence you are preventing other humans to take up that space. Immoral as a 3-tit whore!
And let us not even start with smaller creatures, like cats. Have you any idea how many cats could exist in the space you presently occupy? A lot!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As has already been mentioned, the very first footprint has likely been damaged/destroyed already since it was (obviously) positioned right in the path Neil and Buzz would have to traverse to get into and out of the LEM.
Furthermore, people are talking about a photo of the first footprint, but I'm guessing they are thinking of the famous photo that Buzz took of his own boot impression (as part of analyzing the soil characteristics):
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5877HR.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5878HR.jpg
This was taken quite some time after Neil first stepped onto the lunar surface.
The first footprint might be hiding somewhere in thid photo that Neil took of Buzz coming down the ladder:
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5869HR.jpg
Not so easy to tell which one it would be though, and it's in shadow...
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
Our ancestors who left Africa were as human as us. They may well have documented the event in their own way. Lets say they left cave paintings which made perfect sense to them. But in the intervening years most of the paintings have worn away and the meaning of the others has been lost. People 100000 years in the future aren't going to understand whatever we record beyond that is antelope.
But we can help archeologists of that time by preserving our important sites as much as possible.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So that's what happened to the Anasazi. Now, somebody just needs to go clean up the mess they left.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Its sad that my first thought was this: the very first private venture to the moon will probably sell the Apollo and unmanned probes as the ultimate collectible artifacts to the highest bidder - and there is nothing that can be done about it. of course, I then started thinking more about the logistics as lifting a landing module off the moon and retuning safely and realized it was not going to happen yet, or any time soon. but the point remains that they could and there is nothing that can be done to stop them.
True, but you also have weaker gravity, which will allow pressure from a rocket motor to have a greater effect than on earth
Pressure? I thought we were talking about a vacuum.
Also, debris will fly farther.
What debris?
The only debris is actually the crap coming out of the back of the rocket in gaseous form. I know you could try and make argument that this constituted pressure but since these are occasional particles wandering about in a complete vacuum you might as well model them as such since there are few enough to deal with.
As to whether they would disturb enough dust when the hit the moon surface to erase someones footprint that is any bodies guess as:
1) The module would have to get to certain height before the exhaust gasses could have a clear path to the ground due to the base section of the lander left in situ.
2) I have no idea as to how deep and well formed Neil's footprints were. The dust up there had not been touched so may have allowed his boot to sink quite deeply into the surface.
3) I have no idea of the relative mass of the exhaust gasses to the particulate dust that makes up the moons surface.
Basically, the only way to know for sure is go back and see. Unfortunately this may well result in discovering that the human races first footprint on the moon was perfectly preserved until we trashed it finding out if it was there. Why risk this outcome when the moon is plenty big enough for us to land somewhere else until we have the ability to build a museum around the area without disturbing it.
Disclaimer - Sorry, for being so nitpicky, but several years of Physics with Space Technology will do that to you.
I dont read
Pressure? I thought we were talking about a vacuum.
We're also talking about a rocket motor. The mass ejected from the motor nozzle exerts pressure on whatever it hits.
What debris? The only debris is actually the crap coming out of the back of the rocket in gaseous form. I know you could try and make argument that this constituted pressure but since these are occasional particles wandering about in a complete vacuum you might as well model them as such since there are few enough to deal with.
Observe the dust cloud
this may well result in discovering that the human races first footprint on the moon was perfectly preserved
The first footprint was at the bottom of the ladder. How many times did Armstrong and Aldrin go up and down that ladder? Face it, the first footprint is gone.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.