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Lunar Prospector Ready To Land On Moon
SEWilco writes "Lunar Prospector survived dead batteries caused by eclipse. Shoemaker will hit the moon at 09:51 GMT [05:51 EDT], July 31 1999. At least 21 telescopes will be watching for a water or dust plume. Amateur astronomers see lunarimpact.com. "
Don't worry, people like you are *well* represented in Congress and have seen to it that NASA is dying though ever more and more restrictive budget cuts.
/.'ers) are just going to reply and say it's all a waste of money.
Oh, and they're not looking for evidence of life - they're looking for water and mapping out other resources so that they can improve the life on Earth. But I'm not even going to detail the benefits man could reap from going to the moon - it's kinda obvious you (and tons of other
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" - Einstein
If there is any water in the Moon pole, wouldn't by crashing the probe expose all the ice to the Sun's heat, causing all the water to be evaporated and escapes Moon's gravity, ending up wasting the potential water resource?
You have a good point about social programs - most of these programs actually are based on programs began in the 30's and were an attempt to pull America out of a depression. And for some reason the government is still pumping obscene amounts of money into them and ignoring exploration, both physical and technological.
Except, that is, whenever they take credit for the advances of scientists they've never even met and probably cut the salary of in yet another round of partisan budget fighting.
Yup - interesting fact I heard - DS-1 flew closer to the asteroid than any craft has flown by an object without landing. Or so the news said.
Another cool thing - I never realized it was a semi-autonomous probe, I knew it was testing new tech, but I didn't know AI was one of them. This little probe is basically piloting itself and NASA is talking about releasing a flock of them to all explore the solar system.
Anyone else notice the title of this story? "Lunar Prospector Ready To Land On Moon"
Erm, this is equivalent to crashing your car at 1,100mph. Somehow I think "land" isn't quite the right word.
I think they'd fare better to spend that money improving the life they've already found.. on Earth.
Yea, Like feeding all of the hungry children. Yea that's a good idea!
Never mind the fact that no matter how good it's been in the US we never... ever had enough to feed all of the children. We might as well wait till we fix all of the problems on earth before going to the moon.
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From one of the NASA reports -
"Lunar Prospector was the first of NASA's competitively selected "faster, better, cheaper" Discovery-class missions. The $63 million mission is managed by NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA."
Discovery-class missions? Anyone know what these are, what missions are planned, etc? It's nice to hear NASA is still alive despite Washington's best attempts to kill it through massive budget cuts (have you written your congressmen about that yet? maybe you should).
...does it bother anyone else that they didn't plan for the eclipse? Aren't they supposed to KNOW about that sort of thing?
"Gee, sir, won't the batteries go dead when the sun is blocked by our big fat earth?"
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We're not even at the Surveyor level of technology. It's back to Ranger.
There was no visible dust plume seen from the
impact. So basically, this didn't work. There may
still be results but there seems to be some disappointment.
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/31/moon.htm
Shhhh... no one tell him that the Voyagers, Vikings, and Cassini each cost in the bilions. :) I can't wait till Cassini starts returning data from Saturn. That's going to be a spectacular mission.
It's not $63 million to crash the lunar prospector into the moon. This is, in effect, value added. The original project was to survey the moon using remote sensing techniques.
That project is over. The satellite has lived out it's useful life time and planned mission. The possibilities are: 1) leave it as space junk, orbiting the moon until it's orbit decays or 2) get more science value out of it.
I doubt the whole effort to crash it cost much at all.
And $63 million is dirt cheap for a space project anyways. To see what you can get for the price,
check out the vegetation canopy lidar:
http://essp.gsfc.nasa.gov/vcl/
As someone who works with remote sensing, this is the coolest idea to come along in ages.
On any missions it's better to forget it. Russia is battling to at least save MIR. NASA's budget was axed once more and now even Earth-bound satellites were cutted down. China will probably try to send someone to orbit but it is already clear that it is a pure PR boost.
So be happy. You have lived not only in a time when Man walked over the Moon but also satellites crashed on it...
Of course, a pre-mission(s) to put extra fuel/tanks in earth orbit would be needed (to break earth orbit). The next shuttle then launches, hooks up to the tanks, and away to the moon. The shuttle won't land on the moon, but could easily carry a lander module in it's cargo bay. Nearly a dozen of the original moon landers could fit in that bay. Breaking lunar orbit to return to earth requires no extra boosters and reentry is as usual. Yeah, this could be done. And it'll be trivial compared to the difficulties encountered in the Apollo missions.
"can't we bomb the moon?"
"we don't really need it, do we?"
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
I hear that a portion of that guy's remains will be aboard the thing which crashes into the moon. Talk about an expensive burial. ;)
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the article mentioned that it was a $63 million dollar [project].
Good grief! What do they think they're doing? Spending money like that, simply so they can go to the moon and look around for evidence of life?!? I think they'd fare better to spend that money improving the life they've already found.. on Earth.
Insert mind here.
You are kidding, right? How big do you think Lunar Prospector is for cripes sakes? It's akin to a fly running into you, less than that even...
What is this not going to do something bad to the moon, possible change it's orbit or something?
Well, IIRC the back story of Space:1999 has it that the moon will be knocked clear out of the solar system on September 13, 1999.
;)
Somehow I doubt the Prospector packs enough wallop to do that though
Yeah, like buying another round for everyone in Florida! Or, any of a thousand other worthy projects. Naturally, if you give government a lot of money, it will eventually find ways to offend all of us. Me, I'm not offended by this one... After all, it is cheap! ;)
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Here's a picture and QTVR movie of the spacecraft.
Only if it carried some antimatter. Talk about your "Big Bang".
Prospector smashes into the only place on the moon that could have sustained life. Whoops.
Wouldn't that be a bummer.
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"So we're actually going to land in a minute?" said Arthur.
"Well, not so much land, in fact, not actually land as such, no... er--"
"What are you talking about?" asked Ford sharply.
"Well," said the Captain, picking his way through the words carefully, "I think as far as I can remember we were programmed to crash on it."
"Crash?" shouted Ford and Arthur.
"Er, yes," said the Captain, "yes, it's all part of the plan, I think. There was a terribly good reason for it which I can't quite remember at the moment. It was something to do with... er..."
Ford exploded.
"You're a load of useless bloody loonies!" he shouted.
"Ah yes, that was it," beamed the Captain, "that was the reason."
(Fair use quote from Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, chapter 24.)
I can't think of a more appropriate place for him to be buried.
"We will always know when we look at the moon, that Gene is there."
So like, is the next mission to the moon going to be manned? What ever happened to that silly idea of TAKING THE SHUTTLE TO THE MOON. Hook me up with a leet moon pad.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Remember the extinct NZ bird thay plan to clone from DNA samples!
Remember the extinct NZ bird thay plan to clone from DNA samples! I'd be wary about bringing any moon life back to earth, though. It may well kill us all as earth life will have not developed any immunity to moon bugs.
I don't like the idea of crashing something in the moon. We have no idea if we could upset some ETs or disturb some mystical artifact that is blocking some evil creature (worse than Shub-I... well you know who) from attacking us.
This end of mission was a brilliant way of using that convenient package of kinetic energy to try to gather a little more data. And although this is within the mission's purpose of searching for water, I would not be surprised if future Lunar missions with different purposes will duplicate the experiment.
Well, we're wandering off topic. Although humans probably are producing enough food, it is not evenly distributed. That might be easier if all humans were in one place. Did you know that all 6 billion people could fit in Texas with 1200 squar feet each? Multiply the 260,000 square miles by the number of square feet (5280*5280) and divide by 6,000,000,000. Grouping family square footage, installing roads, and space for business is left as an exercise for the developer. Bonus: Everyone becomes a Texan!
NASA is trying to change how these missions are put together. Rather than have large projects that have multiple objectives, are designed by comittee, and run by NASA, these are smaller self-contained projects.
Basically the PI, conntrols the whole project from sensor design through the collection and analysis of data. NASA gives a fixed budget and then is not involved, other than for oversight is my understanding.
The idea is that the mission can be put together faster and for less money than the tradtional apporoach.
There are examples of their earth science projects following this approach at:
http://essp.gsfc.nasa.gov/
I'm not familliar with their space exploration projects along this line.
Fortunately businesses are starting to move toward space. We should have been using suborbital flights ten years ago for intercontinental travel. Our first trip to the Moon should have involved several landing craft. The Lunar missions should have been assembled next to the first space station thirty years ago. Maybe we'll do better when we don't funnel everything through governments.
Wow, never realized that. Considering that Texas is 7% of the US land and water, if everybody lived in the US, they would get about 17000ft^2 (1580 m^2), about 4/10 of an acre. Which isn't too bad.
I'd like to add that there actually is usually a very large surplus of food produced in the US. It mostly used for feeding animals for meat... The amount of meat produced for the amount of grain used (think about all the grain it takes to raise an animal, then the little meat you get out of it) really isn't worth it when it could be feeding more people.
By the way, what ever happened to that ion propelled craft? Is it still going ever faster?
If the impact has been delayed by one minute owing to a stronger de-orbiting burn than planned, doesn't this mean that the satellite won't land in the intended crater after all, and that therefore the likelihood of releasing water vapour from a cold crater is now greatly reduced?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
63 million is peanuts. Bill Gates could pay for it out of petty cash, and vastly more is wasted away on completely worthless political campaigns.
Giving money to politicians and governments is *not* the way to improve life on Earth, but the way to destroy it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah that's it. 30 years from the first landing. Almost 25 since anything there we are back! By crushing a spacecraft in to the surface...
It looks like we passed all these years of Space exploration to return to the years of Surveyor's and Luna probes. A typical "back to the trees" mood.
Sincerly isn't any other way to explore the Moon? Can anyone take the care of sending at least a Pathfinder-like robot to explore those same craters? Let us note that there is some good probability that this "experiment" will be unsuccessful. A boulder will be enough for its failure.
So we maybe we will still not know anything about water on the Moon for the next 30 years. When another Surveyor/Luna probe is sent to crash on the surface. Great way to study our neighbor!
Don't worry about it. Nanotech isn't too many decades away from giving us total control over materials and dropping the main added-value cost of manufactured goods to near zero. When that does finally happen, the Moon will become just another tourist trap.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Or they could go get $20,000 Billion in precious metals from a single near-earth asteroid.
The Lunar Prospector's neutron spectrometer gave us the first strong evidence of water, about 3e9 tons worth, in the lunar poles. There were other important observations as well. The crash landing, scheduled _after_ the formal completion of the mission, was intended for shits and giggles.
How do you think all those *craters* got there? If a bunch of big honkin' meteors didn't knock it out of orbit, I don't think one puny satellite will...
This BBC article suggests that the first unmanned launch of China's manned rocket may happen in October, on the nation's anniversary. They've also been refitting space tracking ships.
Deep Space 1 flew by asteroid Braille on Thursday. 15 miles above asteroid at 35,000 MPH (KPH in above link).
... is that it wasn't a strong de-orbit burn, but rather a strong initial burn. That would have put Prospector into an orbit slightly higher than predicted. The de-orbit burn could then be adjusted, to aim at the same spot from a slightly different angle than was previously planned.
John
While taking two nanorobots and having them build a nanoconstruction crew and then a space cruiseliner is sweet idea and all, I'm not holding my breath. :)
I suspect we are going to go back much sooner than that, for very practical reasons.
Constellations of communcication satellites are up and down linking huge amounts of data at wavelengths at or near those radio astronomers need to observe at. Since the number and bandwidth of these constellations is not going to go down, radio astronomers are going to become more and more blind.
I suspect, then, that the next people to walk on the Moon will be radio astronomers. They will tend radio telescopes on the other side, using the Moon as a shield to block all of the stray interference from Earth.
It's just a thought, but it seems to be the way things are going, especially given the amount that launch cost are expected to plummet over the next few years.
John
as others have noted, 63MUS$ is pocket change in reality. It is likely the amount of money Americans spend on snacks PER DAY. George W Bush raised 40M$ for his OWN political campaign.
You do touch on an issue. There are people that believe that the NASA money should be spent on social problems, poverty or disease, but really, those programs have been around for decades with trillions down the tube with little improvement (our poverty level hasn't changed by much more than a percent since the 60's). And the NASA budget is peanuts compared to the social programs that we have.
The issue is rarely money. This government has not proven that it is capable of wisely spending what it has, and making all sorts of strange and costly stipulations in order for companies to get a government supplier contract.
Don't forget that mankind should always keep an eye on the future. Eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us, it'll take with it Marylin Monroe, Lao Tzu, Einstein, and everything we've accomplished was for nothing, unless we leave the cradle and go to the stars. (Babylon 5 plug)
I would like some of the money I earn go to something that won't just be consumed by me or someone else without some investment into the future.