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NASA: Lunar Pits and Caves Could House Astronauts
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers have documented hundreds of holes on the lunar surface. These aren't simply craters, but actual pits ranging from 5 to 900 meters across. Scientists suspects many of these will lead to underground cave systems, which NASA says would be great spots for an astronaut habitat once we get back to the Moon. "A habitat placed in a pit — ideally several dozen meters back under an overhang — would provide a very safe location for astronauts: no radiation, no micrometeorites, possibly very little dust, and no wild day-night temperature swings," said Robert Wagner of Arizona State University. He says it's time to send probes into a few of these pits to see what they're like: "Pits, by their nature, cannot be explored very well from orbit — the lower walls and any floor-level caves simply cannot be seen from a good angle. Even a few pictures from ground-level would answer a lot of the outstanding questions about the nature of the voids that the pits collapsed into. We're currently in the very early design phases of a mission concept to do exactly this, exploring one of the largest mare pits."
AGW Activist took special notice of this and are trying to figure out how we can adopt this for everyone on earth. "It's been our goal for a while now to have everyone living in caves to help avoid global warming. This looks like a good plan for here at home"
Al Gore could not be reached for comment.
I suppose that, like a proctologist encountering Goatse Guy... this "exploratory spelunking" will indeed need to be done from a distance. ;)
Only if the US could get it's space program off mothballs... But there's no room in the budget for that due to the black budget takeover...
Newt Gingrich isn't getting any younger, and that Moon-town needs a Mayor.
...hich NASA says would be great spots for an astronaut habitat if we get back to the Moon. "A habitat placed in a p...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Which is code for "extremely cold all the time".
I attended a talk by Dr. Red Whittaker (from CMU) after robotic exploration of the moon. His team is going after the Google Lunar X Prize. They're planning on sending their robot down into a crater to peek into one of these caves.
Sounds like a cool idea to me, but it seems a bit like a cosmic joke that we would in a way be reverting to a past we had here on earth by living in caves. The symbolism is nice, though; starting over in a new environment.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Scientific films of yesteryear have informed us that any lunar caves are inhabited by insect men. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
Yep. It'd be in shadow all the time which means it would be perpetually cold. 26 to 35 Kelvin cold.
That means to maintain the habitat, you'd have to have a perpetual power source. To me, that says you look at the poles with an eye towards building mirrors to reflect sunlight onto a heat collector. The poles are more likely to have a site that has both a pit and more or less full time sun. Unless of course, you want to ship a nuclear reactor to the moon in which case you'll need political will which is scarcer than perpetual sunlight.
If mankind ever does "get back to the Moon," the United States will be on the sidelines, boring the world with tales of greatness.
This is exactly what I said a few weeks ago.
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Yup.
The space program is a lot more productive now than when we were focused on a retarded war with the Russians. Unlike the 60's, we're actually doing basic science and planetary science missions now instead of chest thumping bravado.
I bet they don't find any astronauts housed there.
The movie 2001? They land on the moon and descend into a pit.
Time to re-read _A Fall of Moondust_
sPh
I was unaware that there was any verification that caves even exist on the moon.
And considering the processes that form practically all natural caves here on earth (that I am aware of) involve moving water, or at least glacial movement, I'm not sure how anything like that would ever form on the moon.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Darn... hit submit too soon. The instant I clicked it I realized I had neglected to mention caves formed by volcanic activity. I don't think the moon ever had that either, however.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Video games and movies have been doing this for along time, either on the moon or an asteroids.
The astronauts had better hope that there are no Lunar sarlaccs.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Probably the first men in the moon will be McDonalds, for their new McMooncalf burger.
Um, no. We're not going to the moon or anywhere like it. The economy will likely collapse again before the end of the decade. There won't be the money or the resources. Sending robotic missions makes more sense. Sending people is a dumb idea. We evolved to live here. We are expensive to travel and hard to settle. Machines are constructed to do certain things in certain environments. They are more capable than humans in that regard. Send them to get fried by coronal mass ejections.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The space program is a lot more productive now than when we were focused on a retarded war with the Russians. Unlike the 60's, we're actually doing basic science and planetary science missions now instead of chest thumping bravado.
Much of the science and tech of today's planetary missions are the result of military tech and those glory days of NASA manned missions. Those manned lunar missions were preceded by various robotic lunar missions.
The cold war greatly benefited the space program, it funded its tech. That chest thumping got the public behind all that spending on space. NASA and the US space program suffer today because of a lack of interest by the people. Fortunately the civilian commercial space industry seems to be coming along quite nicely.
That is correct. Evolution is still happening. There were no humans here two million years ago and there won't be any in another two million years. What's the big deal?
To continue with the glass is half full/empty metaphor, you ignore the fact that someday there will be no glass. More mass extinction level events will happen. And the big deal is that it would be a shame to lose the only known intelligent species capable of contemplating and studying the universe in such an event, and lose whatever species may have developed from this intelligent species.
Occupying more than one rock in the solar system greatly increases the species chance of survival. Plus the amount of resources available in asteroids and such dwarfs everything we have acquired from the earth.
The enormous expense involved in manned space flight and habitation is temporary. Yet that expense may well seem paltry if we can get past the bootstrapping phase. I have greater faith in the civilian commercial space industry in this regard than I do with government based projects.
There's a little problem of moon dust. The tiny particles in moon dust are so sharp and jagged that they slice through space suits, filters, and glove seals. As far as I know, NASA was never able to solve this. You couldn't stay there for a prolonged period of time for any reason. If your space suit gets compromised, you're done.
>> it's time to send probes into a few of these pits to see what they're like
Great! Finally we will now discover all the moon-alien hives and secret Nazi UFO moonbases!
If the world agencies capable of such impressive technological wielding of powers could stick to the problems on earth, we would rest easier at night knowing the energy we are consuming is renewable and the food we were eating was healthy.
Sounds like someone else just watched Robinson Crusoe on Mars and had an idea.
If we had unlimited fuel we could travel at near the speed of light through space.
Seriously, though, just because it hasn't been implemented yet doesn't make it news.
There are no insect men in the caves of the moon. Instead there lives a super-intelligent plant being", who keeps an 80-something year old lost, and presumed dead, human astronaut/moon explorer as a pet and making him think that the plant-being is his god.
--
Thurgood.
And as for extinction-level events, life survived; we are here. Who are you to decide what life will survive on this planet millions or billions of years from now?
The one and only known species that is aware of this issue and can have a conversation about it and can do something about it, i.e. not limit itself to this one planet. That's a pretty special species.
They stole my idea! I suggested that in a Mars article a few weeks back.
Those bastards... :)
so you mean to tell me that after thousands of years and billions of dollars that we're going to go to the moon to be cave men? Talk about coming full circle.
We will finally have the first men IN the Moon after all.
And will they meet the insectoid creatures called the Selenites?
Tracy Johnson
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i hate the dome city concept. its the worst possible shape for containing air pressure against vacuum. the ideal shape would be an inverted dome mounted inside a tunnel entrance, or at the opening of a cave or pit. really strong mountings into the stone all around, and a dome material that gets more solid the more pressure is put on it. so this is going in the right direction.
Living in a cave on the moon? Why?