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No dust plume from Lunar Prospecter
Calmacil writes "Lunar Prospector hit the moon, and made no dust plume. Thus, no water was found :( "Darnit, there goes my moon base.
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Cute. But you could at least include one link. How about something about the monoliths or 2001 concepts or 2001 in Clarke's works or mention that the book explains a lot of things which a narrator in the movie would have mentioned.
Here's a blurb...
Even if there is no water found, the only thing that is proven is that there is no water in that particular crater. It's like landing a craft in the middle of the Sahara Desert and saying there are no trees on Earth.
What we should do is send people back. Better than robots - which usually raise more questions than they answer - people can go back out and do some more research.
This time though lets make it worth the trip. Lets put the scientists up there intead of the test pilots. Considering that the last time out of 12 men...the last man to step onto the moon was a qualified geologist...
No, it wasn't the biodome. The people in the biodome stayed in for a year or more IIRC, and were later found to have had outside help in that time. The NASA project kept a 4 person team completely self contained for 3 months; it is actually a proof of concept for a manned Mars mission (if they ever raise that kind of money).
Perhaps they should hurl that modeul they recovered from the ocean (the Grissom one) at Redmond and study the plume that wafts up.
Indeed. A great deal of scientific advancement would be yielded from such a blow. "Examining Redmond for Signs of Intelligent Life"
Insert mind here.
No dust plume is good. It did not hit the crater wall. 21 observatories are analyzing their photos/instruments to figure out if water vapor is there.
At least NASA is recycling unused materials from previous missions that wouldn't have been used otherwise. Perhaps they should hurl that module they recovered from the ocean (the Grissom one) at Redmond and study the plume that wafts up.
There was no dust plume because of the specific place of impact, but that doesn't mean there is no water in there...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Would water really be an essential resource if
...
one wants to build a station on the moon? If
you want to do something useful there you would
have to build large transport capacities anyway.
With enough energy it should be possible to
recycle the water by distillation or electrolyses.
To get enough food to the moon should be more
difficult then to substitute the water losses.
In the first place you need a lot of money and
that seems to be the main reason for these
spectacular experiments
Don't give up on that moonbase just yet, Hemos. Check out the info on the Artemis Project web site. They intend to establish a permanent moonbase within the next several years, and start commercial tourist flights soon thereafter. All totally private, no government involvement. Where is the money coming from? To quote their FAQ, "shameless commercialism"! They have a pretty convincing business plan, that results in ordinary slobs like me being able to take a vacation on the moon within my lifetime. They need skills of all sorts, so go see 'em.
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I'm glad it didn't work, because if it did, Al Gore would have taken credit for inventing the moon.
But seriously, I was hoping for a moonbase too... I guess I'll have to bring some bottled water or something... And I would need plenty of it for my moon-penguins..... muahaha
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Don't give up yet! For those who have been following this story, you'll note that while amateur astronomers were asked to go out in droves just in case, neither the amateurs nor the professionals were ever expecting a visible plume. They were, however, expecting to obtain spectometric readings to detect water. Thus, a determination of whether water was found or not will not be possible for days or even weeks.
Of course, if no water is detected, this is still not proof that there is no water on the moon - only that there is no water at the crash site, or at least not a detectable quantity. Don't give up hope on that moonbase yet Hemos!
Ahh but you can use e.g. solar energy to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen. Its a whole lot easier to load liquid gases onto a spaceship than a bunch of sunlight.....
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Imagine the kind of mirrors that can be built in 0.6 G...
Artemis estimates $1.4 billion for commercial moon trip and points out that computers make engineering much cheaper than in Apollo days.
1.4 billion is 15 Super Bowls. But we're restricting our view here of how much money is available for projects. Just a glance at Yahoo Business News and I see $400 million in one aircraft sale deal.
Actually, yes, the book does mention what the monolith does to the primates.
It is far too late to avoid contaminating the Moon with Earth bacteria. Things leak off the Earth all the time, and every major thunderstorm currently wandering across the globe is accelerating air, water, and bacteria into the upper atmosphere. Some of that stuff gets blown off and pushed by the solar wind across the Solar system. Of course it gets dried up in the process, but some bacteria and viruses survives that. There's even argument as to whether Earth's first life form originally appeared on Earth or Mars.
We need a source of hydrogen and Oxygen to produce rocket-fuel, generate atmosphere, power generation, etc... carting this up would be a pain in the butt, plus become so expensive that Comrade Clinton would even freak at it.
Oh, dont start dreaming of ion propulsion strong enough to leave a gravity well, that aint gonna happen in the next 100 years, we're gonna have to rely on good old newtons.... Make a long explosion in a closed vessel to propel the projectile foreward... I.E. Hydrogen burning, earth(moon?) shaking, fire breathing rocket engines... Hoo Yaa!
we need it for fuel... that's why if the mars fuel generator dont work we will never.... NEVER... send men to mars...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What if it crashed and sent up a big blue dust cloud of death? Windows, the first OS to crash on another planet.
If you read the CNN article they have a comment from a JPL/NASA scientist who said that the lack of a dust plume is a good thing, because it means they didn't hit the crater wall. They wanted to hit on the bottom of the crater so they could get deep enough into the surface to expose/explode the water into space
i remember reading an article in wired about a year ago abour the Lunar-Mars Life Support Test Project.
from the LMLSTP Phase III home page:
wired article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.06/mars.html
LMLSTP index page: http://pet.jsc.nasa.gov/lmlstp.html
rh
Since the Prospector was going to crash in the moon ANYWAY, I'd say it was money well spent - exactly $0. Get your fact straight before posting you ignorant ludite. I'd rather spend $1 million on space than $1 on bailing out failed savings and loans (remember that a coupla years ago). For News for Nerds, a lot of ani-technological right wing pin-heads seem to post here.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
as long as in doing this they did not accidentally break the monolith...
The last altitude-raising burn was hot. The actual last burn took place behind the moon just before impact. This last burn on the last orbit changed the orbit to a collision course, and this last burn was adjusted to compensate for the previous burn.
Remember, this is rocket science performed by rocket scientists...
Yes, the US can be improved if money is invested correctly. But the government rarely does so, as generally it just sucks up money and scatters it around without creating wealth. As the stock markets have been demonstrating, businesses have been doing a good job recently of creating wealth. [If wealth can not be created, all of your great-grandfather's descendants would be living in his log cabin.]
As most plans for extracting metals from the moon warm the moondust up, hydrogen is going to be a by-product of lunar industry. Oxygen is also going to be produced as a by-product in huge volumes because most of the ores are oxides - ie. loaded with oxygen. As habitats are built they will generate their own oxygen and water when their metal components are beign smelted!
But why waste it as rocket fuel? There are plenty of minerals on the moon that burn: sodium, aluminium, phosphorous and with a bit of ingenuety these can make quite rocket fuel for use under the lunar 1/6g. Aluminum-burning rockets have already been developed.
Once you're in space, electrostatic or solar thermal engines running off lunar oxygen or simple moondust will provide enough thrust for cargo transfer to and from the moon.
Have a look at Project Artemis on http://www.asi.org for details.
Vik :v) [Can't login as a non-anonymous coward for some reason - vik@asi.org]
Its time for NASA to start the first interplanetary pub! Its about time...wthen they find whater on the moon.,they only need to get the beer up there.....cheers!!!
Nasa is saying this - Yes the chances are slim, but they will monitor it for a week because they sent it into the wrong place... not like you can really calculate something like a crash landing anywho.
The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil.
There is 10 billion tons of hydrogen in the surface rocks due to volatiles in the solar wind, which is 96 percent hydrogen. I don't know if we could collect H directly from solar wind.