Putting An Observatory On The Moon's 'Dark' Side 314
wytcld writes: "CNN reports astronomers are pushing for a radio telescope on the 'dark side of the moon' (do real astronomers call it the 'dark side,' when it gets plenty of light?). The proposal by Yuki David Takahashi is amazing mostly because a guy just starting work on his Master's is managing major press for it. Still, a nice dream."
For you lazy people ;-) (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, it doesn't mention how exactly they plan on communicating with it! Sure, radio from the earth / reflected off the earth doesn't interfere, but important signals are also blocked.
Re:Advantages? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If you're a RADIO astronomer, yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist), but I would imagine that the influence of the earth's gravity on an object orbiting the moon could destabilize a satellite's orbit rather quickly.
Re:The name... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:International Space Station (Score:5, Insightful)
The space shuttle can only reach a maximum altitude of 600 miles. This is with no additional weight and isnt even close to the clarke/GEO orbit, at 22,500 FT. Anything higher that the shuttle carries has to be launched by the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) mechanism you often see satellites spinning out of. The external tank and SRB's, at 154 FT and 116 FT respectively, are dwarfed by the 373 FT tall SaturnV stack that was used to get the spacecraft far enough out that the S4-B could begin its translunar injection. The space shuttle's current EFT cannot be refueled.
In short, you'd have to dust off the Saturn-V diagrams. Since the government would be paying more than likely, this step alone could cost millions.
Of course, we would want/need to revise a little. Computer weight, increased efficency in fuel, etc.. Chalk up a couple extra hundred mill..
Providing you successfully launch materials into space and onto the surface of the moon. You still need to get assembly teams up - and staff. You could use the same launch system.. But you'd need a completely different capsule design.
Apollo designs just wouldnt cut it. For one, you need seating for more than 3. Granted the space savings of the computer (which was only 1 SQ FT in the original apollo.. dont ask me about that one.) could assist marginally.. a soft cockpit also.. but this theoretical new launch system would likely have the power to launch human weight simply, if its hauling tons and tons of building materials to the moon.
You can see where this is going, and i would love to continue this discussion, unfortunately, my computer is cursed and won't stay up for more than a few minutes at a time. I've had to write this post in notepad.
Don't get me wrong. I'm 150% for space exploration. I think the visions of humanity have become severly limited - the age of wonder has gone the way of Camelot. I'd be on the first moonshot, if i could. I guess they need sysadmins on the moon. I just don't think the US, especially under the republicans, is going to do the space thing much. Remember - Republican translates into "Warmonger, rich oil tycoon" in politiceese - Very little room in dubya's brain for science. Its not christian, anyway. The world still rests atop a stack of giant tortoises. err, wait.. thats hindu.
And before anyone decides to begin a diatribe on the instability of windows, its not windows - its my computer itself. 1)
Linux locks, too, 2) The computer HANGS, the OS doesn't crash.
The only problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The moon has potential... good and bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it make more sense to push for Mars? It's further away from the sun (1.52 AU as opposed to the moon 1 AU), has relatively little atmosphere (mind you there are the dust storms but we're talking radio here), and is the next likely place we humans could go for off-planet colonization. It would be a great precursor to humans coming over... and with an established communication network because of this and possibly other missions, it could encourage private industry to help fund exploration. I would imagine the cost could be the biggest factor that would prevent Mars from being the candidate... damn.. I love our mostly pristine Moon!
The Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope - cratering died out 3.9 billion years ago! (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, the Moon does NOT act as a meteor shield for the Earth, in any significant way: the Moon's mass is only a little over 1% of that of Earth, it's cross-sectional area around 10%, and the Earth-Moon distance is so relatively huge that the chance of anything destined to hit the Moon also coming in a direction that it would have hit the Earth if the Moon wasn't there is somewhere around the 0.1% level - i.e. 99.9% of the meteors that hit the Moon wouldn't have gone anywhere near Earth anyway; and generally the Earth will receive about 10 times as many meteor hits as the Moon does, so the Moon shields a miniscule 0.01% or so of the ones that do hit.
Ok, so much for that theory. What about the rest of the post? Half the time the telescope would be unusable? That's sort of typical of telescopes actually - have you ever tried looking at the stars in daytime? In any case, one of the proposals mentioned was actually a polar observatory, in one of the craters that never receives any sunlight in the amazingly deep south pole basin. These are also shielded from Earth, and would be close to ideal 100% of the time - except they can only look south relative to our orbit around the sun, so somewhat over half the sky would be missing...
So it would be much more feasible to "place a radio telescope device with massive rfi shielding from the earth's noise out in deep space"? First consider the proposed size of these telescopes is huge - several km across! How do you propose to launch such a huge structure (the most massive parts of a lunar telescope would be constructed from in situ materials, and thus not require any launch from Earth)? How do you propose to launch the immensely more massive shielding? We're talking billions of tons here, when it costs $10,000 to launch a pound in the US these days?! Why is it that any time someone talks about the Moon these days it's a ridiculous proposal, but then the same people come up with immensely more hare-brained and expensive schemes!!!
"ask everyone to turn off the power for a few hours"!? I'm sure a few hours a year of telescope time (and remember they're dedicating some sort of Arecibo or bigger-size telescope to this) will really satisfy the astronomers... and what sort of totalitarian political system do you think the world would need to actually get a request like that followed?
Oh well, just had to respond to the +5 on the post...