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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."
Newt Gingrich isn't getting any younger, and that Moon-town needs a Mayor.
Which is code for "extremely cold all the time".
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.
Time to re-read _A Fall of Moondust_
sPh
Most pits were found either in large craters with impact melt ponds – areas of lava that formed from the heat of the impact and later solidified, or in the lunar maria – dark areas on the moon that are extensive solidified lava flows hundreds of miles across.
I only suggest it because to suggest otherwise, which is that humanity will stay here until we are destroyed, is to project that certain extinction-level events will definitely strike our species before we can ever try. I'm only making the assumption that humanity will continue to make progress in the coming decades and centuries... which is less a statement of enthusiasm and more of an inevitability, barring something else happening here which hasn't been foreseen wiping us all out first. The latter is certainly possible, but there's also no reason to conclude that it's particularly likely... except over a very prolonged period, during which time human civilization can continue to advance technologically. So the notion of thinking that we'll get off of this rock before we're wiped out should be seen as at least as probable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's a known fact that the moon once had a lot of volcanic activity. Remaining volcanos are dormant, but lava tubes still exist.
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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.
By us, of course I mean our machines, not physical humans - the distinction between abstracting 'our' presence via a machine or by the physical presence of a bunch of humans we've never met and are not related to us is purely arbitrary. What makes humans distinct from other creatures is that we can abstract our intent into machines that fulfill that intent: ploughs, swords, trains, coaches, treaties, man pages, computers, space probes. We are not limited by the limitations of our physical bodies.
To suggest that we, ill adapted to space as we are, ought to go physically into space instead of sending a machine is absurd - like saying that a field is only plowed if dug by hand, or the only correct calculation is done without the aid of a computer, calculator or abacus.
There's just an opportunity in Siberia - just opened up this week. Current theories are giant sandworms, graboids, pingo's, ufo's or an alien missile base:
http://sploid.gizmodo.com/myst...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
To suggest that we, ill adapted to flight as we are, ought to go physically into the sky instead of sending a machine is absurd - like saying that a field is only plowed if dug by hand, or the only correct calculation is done without the aid of a computer, calculator or abacus.