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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. "
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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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!
After all, they have to pay whether people work or not, so it's much better for them to put people to work in projects like this.
The paradox here, is that their space program is one of the areas that require relatively low tech (after all, we're talking 1969 tech here to reach the moon), and thus is a lot easier to reach than for instance building up a up to date consumer electronics industry. It also has a very high PR value, as you noted. Just consider how the Soviet Union used Sputnik to scare the US into the realization that Soviet actually was a force to be considered, and the resulting race to beat them to the moon.
What do you think would happen if China would launch a moon mission? (Yeah, they have a lot of work to do, have they even launched a manned mission yet?) They would be the second nation to reach it. And it could spark another space race...
For imagine the PR consequences for the US if the Chinese end being the first to send a manned mission to Mars?
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.
Just imagine the cool new OSS projects in an age of 'savagery, super-science, and sorcery.'
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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!
This will not affect the Moon's orbit. It's like a car hitting it. If the impact point were in the center of the visible side of the Moon it would be too small to see. And with the naked eye you can see that there have been impacts a lot larger and the Moon is still in a reasonable orbit.
Or they could go get $20,000 Billion in precious metals from a single near-earth asteroid.
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.
If plans are made for another manned mission, there certainly would be more unmanned missions to study the possible landing areas. Remember the many Surveyor crash landings before Apollo? Taking pictures down to impact...but the data rate was too slow back then to get good closeups just before impact.
Deep Space 1 flew by asteroid Braille on Thursday. 15 miles above asteroid at 35,000 MPH (KPH in above link).
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