Hubble Zooms In On Moon Minerals 191
DIY News writes "Lunar scientists have already returned to the moon, using the Hubble Space Telescope and old Apollo Program rock samples to begin prospecting for useful ores. Locating ores rich in oxygen and metals is seen as the first step in making the next decade's human return to the moon more self sufficient and cost effective. Some wavelengths of UV are filtered out by Earth's atmosphere, which is why Hubble can do the job better than a ground-based telescope."
Hollywood basement ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank goodness (Score:5, Interesting)
Try This (Score:1, Interesting)
They could then create enclosed areas for harvesting the by-products, might be cheaper. Any Ideas?
Zoom (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A little OT but... (Score:2, Interesting)
When/if oil (and coal, and natural gas) get too expensive, we'll shift our electricity generation away from those fuels and towards nuclear. Between direct use of electricty, and the generation of hydrogen for a portable fuel source, we can do/build everything we need.
Of course, these commodities aren't just used as fuels; oil provides lubrication, plastics, and lots of other refined products. Most of those can be obtained through recycling though, especially if there is plenty of electricty. Also, when the reserves got low, we'd stop using the stuff as fuel and conserve what's left for these other uses.
Re:Hollywood basement ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Given enough contrast with its surroundings, an object could be as small at 4 meters wide and still be visible at
I remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Key points from the actual article (Score:5, Interesting)
By then comparing the Hubble data to actual laboratory-studied samples that astronauts brought back from the same sites, they were able to get a clear idea just how these same minerals look through Hubble's eye. The Hubble Space Telescope can discriminate very subtle color differences on the surface," said planetary scientist Mark Robinson of Northwestern University. So subtle that Hubble can see mineralogical differences in rocks that look identical in color to the human eye, he said."
So the Hubble can in fact discern with a usable degree of precision....
"At Aristarchus, Hubble detected what appeared to be an abundance of the mineral ilmenite, which is good news, said NASA lunar scientist Michael Wargo. By heating or passing an electrical current through ilmenite, it's a simple matter to release oxygen, which can be used for breathing and for rocket fuel, he explained."
It will be easy to extract at least one useful element....
Ahhh...I'll just include the rest of the article.
"In some ways the Hubble prospecting is just the bare beginning of the next phase of lunar exploration, said Garvin. The next step will be taken by the robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is being built to map out the moon's resources in details.
A second lunar probe is also being planned, all before the planned return of humans to the moon by about 2018, as directed by President George W. Bush's vision for humans in space.
In a sense, said Robinson, the Hubble prospecting experiment is giving scientists the first taste of how to interpret the deluge of lunar data that will be coming from those spacecraft.
"It will be a Niagara Falls of data," he said. "This is really going to jump start our ability to understand this data.""
So this Hubble use is part of what seems to me to be a sound plan for preparing to build a base on the moon.
Re:I remember... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hubble can do short images of the moon with no problem, aside from the challenge of guiding. It does images of the earth all the time. These are called earth calibrations and they serve as the basis of flat fields with which HST images are calibrated. You can't see anything in them, though, because the earth is too close to focus on, and the telescope is moving at ~300 miles/min, so the images are just blurry streaks across cloud tops. That's why they make good flat fields.
Not long after launch, HST did some "imaging" of the sun. The idea was to point the telescope 180 degrees away from the sun while using a small backwards-pointing light collector on the original WF/PC to pre-flood the CCD with solar ultraviolet. It never got used , though. HST Proposal 1478: WF/PC UV FLOOD GUIDING TECHNIQUE VERIFICATION [stsci.edu], if you're interested. Here's an example image [stsci.edu].
So the only major solar system object that HST has never imaged-besides the objects we don't know about-is Mercury. It's too close to the sun. The aperture door will close if we try to point there.
He3 is the key (Score:2, Interesting)
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/ [wisc.edu]
and here
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/1283 056.html?page=1&c=y/ [popularmechanics.com]
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)