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NASA Begins Work on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Feb 08, 2006 05:19 PM
Moon Space Science
soldeed writes "Space.com is reporting the beginning of construction on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Which is scheduled for launch in late fall of 2008. It will orbit the moon at fifty kilometers and image the entire surface at high resolution. A far Ultraviolet instrument will enable it to see into areas permanently in shadow and see if there is indeed ice there. LRO will count craters and image American and Soviet landing sites."
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[+] NASA's $73 Million Water-Finding Trick 294 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at NASA, obviously looking for new ways to explore the universe, are planning to crash a two-ton probe into the moon. The goal? To find water." From the article: "NASA plans a series of robotic precursor missions including the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, which will plow into the crater, and the mapper, called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. When LCROSS strikes the crater, it is expected to create a hole 16 feet deep and send up a 2.2 million-pound (998,000-kg) plume of debris for sensors and cameras stationed on a second spacecraft to monitor. Dozens of ground-based telescopes, as well as possibly space observatories, such as the Hubble telescope, will be trained on the plume as well."
[+] Technology: US To Launch Military Orbital Spaceplane 270 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Not only is the US readying its first 100% military spaceplane for a November launch, but it's going to push NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission til 2009: 'The USAF and Boeing will launch the X-38B — the first military orbital space plane if you discount the secret military shuttle — on top of an Atlas V rocket in November. They want to test its flying features in space and during atmospheric reentry. And probably its anti-matter rays and nuclear bays and hyperspace engines too (but of course, they are never going to tell you that). However, there seems to be a conflict with the civilian space program which may push one of the Moon exploration missions to 2009.' Screw the moon. We have to defend ourselves against all those alien extremists from Mars!"
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  • A hoax indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mrs. Grundy (680212) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:21PM (#14673266) Homepage
    FTFA: Take note. For you "Apollo landings were a hoax" believers LROC's sightseeing abilities should set the record straight...

    Like I'm going to buy that. If they could fake the whole dog and pony show in the 60's do they really think we're so guallible as to beleive they can't doctor a few images? Like NASA doesn't have photoshop.

    On a more serious note, when I read these amazing stories I can't help think of Hamlet:

    What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me;

    Here we are performing these amazing feats of technology while down on the ground we are firebombing each other, mincing words about what is and isn't torture, and rioting in the street over a few line drawings. Part of me thinks we should focus our resources on problems here where our feet touch the ground, but another part thinks that we have tried that long enough and hopes that maybe by demonstrating how admirable our faculties really are we may move beyond our differences and inspire some solidarity.

    • On the topic of those who believe Appolo was a 'hoax'
      I have never ceased to be amazed by people's ability to believe in completely radiculous things, even in the face fo a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Did they land on the moon? They did. It's not a matter of belief but of fact. On the other hand, do I ascribe the world-shaking importance to it that many do? No. It may have been a big step for man, but even a big step, is just a step. We're forever expanding our horizons in science, this prob

      • Re:How can you be sure? (Score:5, Funny)

        by vertinox (846076) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @06:06PM (#14673607)
        Did they land on the moon? They did. It's not a matter of belief but of fact.

        Are you sure? Have you seen imperical proof? Have you been to the moon? Have you personally met anyone who has been to the moon?

        For that matter... Can we prove that there was the cold war? Or maybe World War 2?

        Maybe my Grandfather was lying to me. Or better yet, he believed he was telling the truth and was brainwashed? What if there is a grand conspiracy to write text books and doctor photographs of events that never happened.

        I mean what if we had photoshop for centuries and our ancestors were simply making up events as they went along and all our history boooks are made up?

        How do can I prove that all my family members aren't actors and the universe isn't a big joke and all my memories aren't simply false and the universe isn't only 6 seconds old and god is a big supercomputer sitting in some aliens basement?

        I can't.

        So I'll have to assume everything everyone tells me is true... except the people who are lying to me. ;)

        Now I just have to figure out who is lying to me.
        • Get a good telescope. Locate where in the Sea of Tranquility the missions were at. Point your telescope at the moon and look for signs. While a daunting mission to be sure, they left all manner of crap up there. The landing platform, the rovers, the flags. Tracks are not something you'd probably see, but you should be capable of seeing the disturbances of the landing even still. The moon does not wash away it's telltails so quickly.

          Would it be fact enough if you saw it with your own 2 eyes?
          • Before you do that, you might want to study up on optics. I'm just sayin'.
            • And this demonstrates neatly the utter absurdity of hoax claims. To explain the amount of evidence for the moon landings away, conspiracy theorists have to essentially make the mission even more complex. For instance, there's a mirror sitting up there that scientists still use to bounce laser beams off of to gain all sorts of data on the Moon's orbit. Now perhaps you could point to how exactly NASA would have managed to get that mirror up there and aligned properly. I await your idiotic explanation with
        • [If] there are 3 Moon Rovers, the people that think it was a hoax, will need to think in another theory ;)

          No they won't!

          'And you think that Nasa would be so stupid as to release those pictures without doctoring them up first?'
          You really don't think like a conspiracy theorist, do you?

    • Re:A hoax indeed (Score:5, Funny)

      by Bogtha (906264) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:29PM (#14673333)

      Take note. For you "Apollo landings were a hoax" believers LROC's sightseeing abilities should set the record straight...

      Actually, that's "Apollo landings theory " thank you very much.

    • Considering the expense of space exploration, deep exploration will need many nations to come together. What unites people more then a common goal?

      Also, there are many people, and not all of us are firebombing people.

    • Soviets would not have let us get away with it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by soldeed (765559) on Thursday February 09 2006, @01:27AM (#14675460)
      I am 45, and grew up during Apollo missions. I closely followed every mission. I KNOW it happened. It could not be faked. If you disagree, consider, If it were a hoax the Soviet Union and any other country with a radio telescope could tell it was. On launch mornings, the television coverage would include a shot of the Soviet "trawler" hanging off the coast observing the proceedings. In fact, the soviets were very interested in observing our spaceflights. They tracked them in orbit, they tracked them going , decending, acending, and returning from the moon, and then at the splashdown theres another "trawler" hangin around. It was easy to do! you did'nt need a powerful radar as the spacecraft was constantly beaming back telemetry data and radio transmissions in the clear. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world at the time because of their absolute secrecy, the Soviets manned lunar program [russianspaceweb.com]was having a little trouble with their N1 [myspacemuseum.com] boosters blowing up. In light of their own failure, and the general hostile attitude toward the United States, you cannot convince me that they would just stand by and let us evil capitalist pigs get away such a fakery! WE WENT!
  • The article doesn't mention if these images will be public domain or not. It would be really awesome if they were. At present, Google Moon [google.com] is pretty damn low-res (I know it was created as a joke, but still), being able to zoom in and out of high-resolution pictures of the moon would be really cool.

    • NASA World Wind has Moon and more (Score:5, Informative)

      by CarpetShark (865376) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:37PM (#14673391)
      NASA World Wind, which is quite similar to Google Earth, also has Moons and stars etc. You can also "drive" across a landscape, following it's contours, rather than just having fly-bys that don't give a sense of the real heights etc. It's more focused on educational uses, and open source too. All in all, a very interesting alternative to google earth. I wish the two projects would collaborate.

      Having said all that, I get weird "application error" messages with the latest version. Seems to work for most people though. Anyone figured this out yet?
    • AFAIK NASA generally doesn't copyright any of the images or data from their missions(Hubble might be an exception though, atleast for the first year). More info here [nasa.gov].

    • Re:Public Domain? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman (238306) <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:54PM (#14673525) Homepage Journal
      Government agencies are not allowed to hold copyrights. If the images belonged to a third party that NASA contracted out to, then you might have an issue. Fortuanetly, it's usually NASA's mission to get those photos, so they belong to NASA even if NASA contract for the space vehicle to be built by someone else.

      NASA's page on the subject. [nasa.gov]
        • From the LROC site http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LROC/summary.htm l [northwestern.edu]

          "All the data collected from the LROC will be transferred to the Planetary Data Systems (PDS). In all, about 62 terabytes (TB) of data will be sent to PDS from the data collected by LROC including the raw images in the original spacecraft viewing orientation (NASA Level-0) and radiometrically processed images (NASA Level-1) of the entire image collection. In addition, geometrically processed images (NASA Level-1C) from a subset of the im
  • Ultimately, where there is ice, there is water. And with water, life is sustainable. Earth has a unique situation in thatwe have plenty of water, but based on present propulsion methods, it is terribly expensive to get it off the Earth. The Moon on the other hand may afford us a resource more accessably in lifting terms. Ultimately the Moon is just a small step in further space exploration.

    Louis Friedman said "Carl Sagan remarked, many years ago, that the Moon could end up a detour, rather than a stepping stone, to Mars. How lunar missions would lead to a Mars landing must be closely examined. The essential requirement is to keep the focus on sending humans to Mars -- investigating conditions of life and habitability on that planet."

    This desire to exlore mars is reliant on our mastering reaching and taming the moon.

  • The Bigger Picture (Score:5, Informative)

    by lightyear4 (852813) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:34PM (#14673371) Homepage
    The LRO, from TFA, is the opening volley of spacecraft in response to President George W. Bush's multi-billion dollar Vision for Space Exploration that he outlined in January 2004. Now, thats curious. The other NASA article [slashdot.org] we saw today made me reflect upon the sad reality of NASA funding. From THAT article [newscientistspace.com], we have the following information regarding its purse:
    • $6.234 billion for space operations, such as the shuttle and the International Space Station
    • $5.330 billion for science
    • $3.978 billion for exploration systems, including the development of the shuttle's replacement, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV)
    • $0.724 billion for aeronautics research
    And another quote:

    The science programme, which Griffin called one of the nation's "crown jewels", increases by just 1.5% compared to 2006. Furthermore, science will receive annual increases of just 1.0% from 2008 to 2011, according to the budget request.

    Such slow growth is down to NASA removing $2 billion from the science budget over the next five years to help cover projected cost overruns of $3 billion to $5 billion to fly the shuttles safely until they are retired in 2010.

    Now, "crown jewel" NASA has been and can be; however, at the moment, it is a poor belittled child forced to do too much with too little. Bush proclaimed that the US shall return to the moon and regain its prestige in the international space community. Fine. But what irks me is that his words seem now, in retrospect, as political posturing carrying little weight. What progress can NASA truly be expected to make without enough funding? Sure, theres the national deficit, and NASA is a massive bureaucracy in and of itself that could do with a little less dead wood. But when you consider the costs of Apollo and Gemnini in today's dollars, the comparison between what IS being done and what COULD be done is a telling one.

  • Google Moon! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MavEtJu (241979) <`gro.ujtevam' `ta' `niwde'> on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:53PM (#14673511) Homepage
    It will orbit the moon at fifty kilometers and image the entire surface at high resolution.

    I see a business opportunity for Google coming up!

    (and am waiting for the The Register's Black Helicopters Report about it)

  • Maybe they can... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rAiNsT0rm (877553) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @05:55PM (#14673531) Homepage
    Take some photo's of any evidence that may be left on the moon from the original trip to finally shut all the whack-job fucks up about us not going to the moon for real initially.
    • Take some photo's of any evidence that may be left on the moon from the original trip to finally shut all the whack-job ....

      I agree it would DEFINITELY be interesting to see. I am thinking though, since the last man to stand on the Moon was Eugene Cernan in December 1972 that most of that evidence has been blown away or buried by dust particles.
      Maybe if they get high-res scans of the landing areas they can see if anything remains.

      I'll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon. [wikimedia.org]

      • Blown Away? By what, exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Ellis D. Tripp (755736) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @06:19PM (#14673695)
        There isn't any air to do any "blowing".....

      • Re:Evidence may have been blown away (Score:5, Informative)

        by necro81 (917438) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @06:25PM (#14673725) Journal
        I don't think so - the remnants of the landings site are almost certainly in pristine condition. The moon has (essentially) no atmosphere for winds to blow around, and no atmospheric dust to settle on the site. There are no corrosives to eat away at the remaining equipment - principally the lower half of the LEM. Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare, so there is basically no chance that the sites have been swallowed up.

        I can think of only two mechanisms that could bring about wholesale changes to the sites. First a large meteor could have landed on or near the landing site and obliterated it, or covered it with debris. An impact like that would require a substantially-sized meteor - I'd guess on the order of 10 kg. Those kinds of impacts are rare enough as it is, and the chances of any one Apollo site being hit with one are miniscule, let alone all 6. Second, the intense radiation has weakened the man-made objects left behind to the point that they have crumbled to dust. This may be true of the plastics, but the metal remains would be nearly impervious to it, at least on the timescale of decades.

        The lunar explorations (robotic and manned) have proven that the Moon's surface does not change quickly. The Apollo astronauts fully expected that their footprints would still be visible in the dust thousands of years from now. In a million years, there may indeed be nothing left of the Apollo sites. On the whole, however, the Moon's surface has not changed during the whole timescale of human civilization.

  • If this mission is a success, President Bush hopes that it will lead to a manned landing on the Moon at some point in the future.

  • Chinese (Score:3, Funny)

    by sammyo (166904) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @06:17PM (#14673686) Journal
    I'll be pretty funny if on the first pass it
    sends back images of Chinese workers waving.

  • Details about the spacecraft and its capabilities (Score:3, Informative)

    by rufey (683902) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @06:20PM (#14673699)
    You can get the details of the spacecraft from Goddard Space Flight Center [nasa.gov].

  • Now What Will THe Hoaxers Say? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AlterTick (665659) on Wednesday February 08 2006, @07:38PM (#14674125)
    For months I've been reading the ApolloHoax.net/clavius.org forum [proboards21.com] wherein a handful of ignorant goofballs continuously argue with scores of rational people about whether the moon landings were faked. When asked what it will take to prove to them that the landings are real, most essentially essentially evade the question because they're not interested in the truth-- they want to believe the conspiracy. But one nut at least likes to ask "why doesn't NASA go back and take some pictures if it's really true?" The rebuttal is usually along the lines of "even if they did, you'd claim THOSE were faked too". It will be interesting to see how long it takes him to start shouting "PHOTOSHOP!" once the pics come out...

    Really, I think the best proof that it's not a hoax is that there's no way that many people could keep a secret for that long.

    • 2 Things

      1. TFA from 2 days ago mentioned the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (today's TFA)
      2. Where do you get the left hand not knowing what the right is doing bit?

      The whole point of the LRO is to map the moon so they can decide where they want to land future missions.
    • And it can be seen as a preperation for colonization. They're imaging the moon's surface in greater detail and in another part of the spectrum. This will be a big help in determining where to site colonies.

      I already curb my dog, thank you.
    • Imagine a crater, well away from the equator. If the walls are high enough, there will be places on the side nearest the equator that the Sun never reaches, and are in permanent shadow. You also get the same effect on the "back side" of mountains.

    • Re:Permanently in Shadow? (Score:5, Informative)

      by corbettw (214229) <corbettw.yahoo@com> on Wednesday February 08 2006, @06:30PM (#14673758) Homepage Journal
      Last time I checked, the Moon orbits the Earth in such a way that the same side of it always faces Earth, however, during a solar eclipse, the side of the Moon that faces away from Earth faces the Sun, so how are there places on the Moon that are "permanently in shadow?"

      According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon [wikipedia.org], the Moon's axial tilt is only 3.6 to 6.69 degrees. So at the poles, there could be spots in deep craters that never get sunlight.
    • That wouldn't make a lick of sense at the present time. You could spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars sticking up a constellation of navigation satellites for 4 astronauts at a time, or you could spend a couple hundred grand on a radio direction finder system like a mini-LORAN set up at each landing site.

      Plus lunar orbits are unstable (the article didn't go into this in detail, but I suppose it's probably due to the big freaking ball of gravity somewhere off in the vicinity of Earth).

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