Roaming Robot May Explore Mysterious Moon Caverns

ananyo writes "William 'Red' Whittaker often spends his Sundays lowering a robot into a recently blown up coal mine pit near his cattle ranch in Pennsylvania. By 2015, he hopes that his robot, or something like it, will be rappelling down a much deeper hole, on the Moon. The hole was discovered three years ago when Japanese researchers published images from the satellite SELENE1, but spacecraft orbiting the Moon have been unable to see into its shadowy recesses. A robot might be able to 'go where the Sun doesn't shine', and send back the first-ever look beneath the Moon's skin, Whittaker told attendees at a meeting of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in Hampton, Virginia, last week. And Whittaker is worth taking seriously-his robots have descended into an Alaskan volcano and helped to clean up the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant."

Comments

Enough with the space rocks

[petsounds]

I mean, what else do you think a rover would find down there? While potentially exciting for planetary geologists, for most of us -- including the vast majority of people who pay for these missions -- studying rocks, aside from the engineering gymnastics of getting into the cave, does not stir the human spirit of exploration. Lets explore the seas of Titan, the volcanoes of Io, or the water geysers of Enceladus, not another rock-hunting trip with taxpayer money. There's a decent chance of finding life in our solar system, and yet NASA keeps turning away from that goal in favor of literally dry material.