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The Search For Apollo 10's "Snoopy"
astroengine writes "A UK-led team of astronomers are going to use their comet and asteroid-hunting skills to track down a piece of Apollo history. In 1969, Apollo 10 did everything the first moon landing (Apollo 11) did, except land on the lunar surface. During the Apollo 10 mission, the lunar module, nicknamed 'Snoopy,' was jettisoned and sent into a solar orbit — it is still believed to be out there, 42 years later. 'We're expecting a search arc up to 135 million kilometers in size which is a huge amount of space to look at,' British amateur astronomer Nick Howes told Discovery News. 'We're aware of the scale and magnitude of this challenge but to have the twin Faulkes scopes assist the hunt, along with schools, plus the fact that we'll doubtless turn up many new finds such as comets and asteroids makes this a great science project too.'"
Imagine if all the money spent on sending handfuls of people into space was spent on health care education here on Earth?
Seems to me that spending money on something that will eventually contribute to the over-population of the planet while NOT spending money on ways to get off this rock, would be the definition of counter-productive.
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What is the ratio of what is spent on NASA to what is spent on "Defense"?
There is a lot of waste in the budget, but NASA and the sciences are not one of them.
How hard can it be to find Snoopy? Just look for an area where bombs are being dropped, then search for a biplane within that area. When you find that, follow the trail to the nearest Christmas party, and you'll find Snoopy drowning his sorrows in a (root) beer.
We don't know the exact orbit. If this had been from only a few years ago this would be a small range. But after 40 years this means that the module has a massive range. We don't know where it is. Although we should have a better idea how fast it should be moving which helps slightly. Also, this sort of thing has been done before. Since the late 1700s there's been attempts to track down objects based on some observations. This started off in some sense with Halley's Comet, but that was more about realizing that a large set of observations were the same thing (Halley also had the advantage of realizing that Jupiter and Saturn had a major impact on comets and also had Newton's previous work to guide him). The next time this would be used would be in the early 1800s when Gauss (yes, that Gauss as in Gauss's law and lots of other math and physics stuff. He was very productive.) calculated the orbit of Ceres based on a few months of observations. Since then we've refined these sorts of techniques a lot, and in this case we aren't limited to ground based observations since we have a pretty good idea where and when Snoopy was sent out.
The main problem is going to probably be that Snoopy is tiny. Something this small is very hard to see even with very good telescopes. Most asteroids that are detected with telescopes are much larger than the lunar lander. Spotting something of that size even with the (fairly large) telescopes that they are using will be tough.
I guess the larger question is "Why?" Why are they even looking for this in the first place?
Because it's there.
Seriously, if we never did anything except the true and tested, we would never have left Africa. I'm sure the first one who said "I want to see what's over that mountain" was ridiculed by the tribal reactionaries.
For example, did you know the flu shots are ineffective and even dangerous? If you start to show the signs of a flu there are simple things you can do. A homeopathic remedy of Oscillococcinum along with Chiropractic adjustments form a two-pronged attack on the flu virus. The Oscillococcinum attacks the young viruses while the adjustments to the spine help the body's innate healing capabilities destroy the mature virus. It's a 100% painless and safe way to heal yourself from within with the human body's most powerful weapon: innate intelligence.
Bob, are you trying to troll at this point? We've got homeopathy involved now too? Ok. Let's spell this out very explicitly: There's no such thing as a young virus or a mature virus. Viruses don't have any metabolism. That means they are either fully assembled or they are being assembled or they are being disassembled while infecting something. There are no young viruses. If you know this little about basic biology you might want to consider what else you don't know. Maybe, just maybe you are wrong about chiropractice being the be all and end all. It takes a lot of effort to admit you are wrong. Many humans can't do it for things they've spent a lot of time believing. But, maybe you can.
However, I suspect you won't. You'll just keep spamming your misguided ideas all over Slashdot and the rest of the internet. In which case, kindly go practice chiropracticory on yourself.
You can't make much progress in only one field of research at a time, and you certainly can't predict which branch of scientific (or other) endeavor will bring the next improvement in the human condition. Chemistry, biology, physics, etc all advance much more quickly when we employ them together, and space research does just that.
Chasing only short-term benefits is exactly the kind of thing that has gotten us into the mess we're in.
Exactly. The BANK bailout cost the US taxpayer more then the ENTIRE 50 YEAR OPERATING FUND OF NASA.
Good-bye
When the short term benefit is, literally, life versus death... opting for anything but immediate relief for the dying is pure evil.
Thinking short-term is what is pure evil.
There are also the Apollo 8, 10, 11 and 12 S-IVBs (3rd stage). (Starting with Apollo 13, the S-IVBs were impacted on the Moon to produce "Moonquakes" for the ALSEP seismometers). For all of those except for Apollo 8, there were also 4 large SLAs (panels) around the LM, which were ejected when the LM was retrieved just after TLI. (The Apollo-8 panels stayed on the S-IVB, as it had no LM.) In a real trivia, the Apollo 13-17 SLAs also should be out there, as the S-IVB was directed to hit the Moon after the LM was retrieved, and thus after they were ejected.
There was a claim that the S-IVB for Apollo 12 might have been found. I don't know if that was ever confirmed, though.
I'd like to applaud "Dr. Bob" for doing more to debunk the validity of chiroquacktic than anyone.
A good start would be to have people in shithole, arid areas of the world stop having 12 kids per family (plus all the illegitimates).
A nice followup would be to eliminate a lot of the hyperprocessed crap that's eaten in the "developed world", stop wasting corn making HFCS, etc.
Unfortunately, what these really require is a political solution because it's predominantly a political problem. In the US, HFCS production is high because of government subsidies, mostly because Republican legislators are beholden to Iowa/Midwestern corn conglomerates that also lobby to keep import tariffs on sugar high. The import tariffs limit incoming sugar, the corn subsidies ensure that southern-grown sugarcane can't compete pricewise with body-damaging HFCS.
In europe, it's not much different. Common Agricultural Policy subsidies make it so that certain crops are impossible to grow, even though they'd be better environmentally and economically otherwise.
Welcome to life.
Nobody seriously uses the phrase 'space nutters' besides you. You do use it a lot, though.
Do you know what the best forms of population control that isn't some Faustian bargain? A larger middle class, health care as a human right, and education.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah. Wah wah wah wah wah.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
No we don't, especially not permanently. Populations will grow exponentially, while resources are bounded.
Also, don't forget that our food productivity is so high only because people wasted money and time tinkering with science, rather than feeding the poor.
There's even a documentary about it.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
That we have the resources, at this moment, to utterly and permanently eliminate starvation is not an if.
Really? The primary cause of starvation in most of the world is NOT lack of food or money. The causes are political. Warlords stealing shipments, governments not allowing humanitarian aid, funds being diverted or squandered. Unless your "resource" somehow avoids those pitfalls, you can't stop starvation. duh.
You've been reading the 'Nutter's Weekly' again, haven't you?
Take any culture, be it human, canine, rodents, or whatever. Allow that culture to breed without restraint, and soon, that culture will have consumed all available resources. Worse, it will probably poison itself with it's own waste products. Go get yourself a petrie dish, and try it out. Just put one little organism in the dish, with unlimited nutritional resources. You can even replenish those resources every day if you wish. Just watch, and see how long it takes your culture to poison itself.
No, you can't solve the world's hunger problem permanently, unless you execute all the people of reproductive age. Don't talk so crazy, man!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Every school I know of has some sort of mandatory health class that teaches how to take care of ones self. And yet... people still do stupid things like smoke, drink [excessively], eat way too much unhealthy food and fail to excercise. They even persist in believing in absurd things like homeopathy and that chiropractic adjustments will cure non back-related issues like infections of the flu virus. I don't think adding more money into health education is going to do any good.
I prefer to imagine a world where the stupid people stop breeding and more money is spent on science and technological progress thank you very much!
Yes (although this is reverse engineering). In orbital dynamics, the easiest thing to change in the mean anomaly - i.e., where are you on the orbit. Orbital shape, size and orientation is harder to change (and, thus, easier to model). This is true both for initial errors, and for perturbations. Suppose you get the semi-major axis just a little off, say 300,000 km, or ~ 0.2%. Then you have the orbital period wrong by ~ 0.3%, and each year you build up an error of about 1.2 degrees of mean anomaly (longitude along the orbit). That's ~ 1.4 million km error per year, and it just keeps growing, to 135 million km now. This vehicle is subject to radiation pressure (from sunlight), and I imagine that the 135 million km is an mean anomaly error estimate derived from an estimate of the original orbit error, plus radiation pressure and other perturbations since then.
(300,000 km sounds in some ways like a big error for a spacecraft, but they sent this off by burning all of the fuel, and they may not have tracked it too carefully or for too long after that.)
When folks want to learn to program, or in fact do pretty much anything, I usually suggest they pick an arbitrary project idea in the general field and simply start working on it. *What* exactly they're working on matters less than that they are working on something and learning from the process. (The scope of the project ideally grows naturally on their existing knowledge base).
In this case anybody working on this is developing (hopefully better) technology for finding stuff. That technology will go into our lexicon and when the aliens arrive we'll be all set to "quick, see if you can find them on the deep space scanners".