Moon Rocks Still In Demand After Almost 40 Years 142
During NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, roughly 842 pounds of rocks were collected from the lunar surface. Scientific demand for the rocks has always been high, and a review board tracks and sends out hundreds of samples each year, even now, decades after the rocks were brought to Earth. They've provided researchers with a wealth of information about the entire solar system. From the NYTimes:
"The samples have confirmed that asteroid and meteor impacts, not volcanism, created the vast majority of craters that define the Moon's topography, while a constant barrage of meteorites, micrometeorites and radiation melted and pureed the bedrock to create the blanket of fine-grained soil and dust -- known as regolith -- that now cloaks the lunar surface. And knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years, has enabled scientists to establish a baseline that allows them to date geologic features throughout the solar system. The surface of the Earth, one of the solar system's youngest topographies, is constantly changing, as it is faulted, folded, shaped and reshaped by eruptions, earthquakes and erosion. By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets."
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That would make for some interesting study. One thing that springs to mind is the possibility of a black market trade for mars rock. Not that I would do something like that.
No really...
Re:Mars missions (Score:5, Interesting)
No idea about the Smithsonian, but I've already seen Mars rock - at the Natural History Museum in London [nhm.ac.uk].
Bits blasted off Mars in some titanic collision aeons in the past, which have drifted through space before falling to Earth as meteorites. Bit of a roundabout route, but it works!
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Bits blasted off Mars in some titanic collision aeons in the past, which have drifted through space before falling to Earth as meteorites. Bit of a roundabout route, but it works!
There's also some like that from the moon. I wonder if they are studied as much as Apollo rocks.
Re:Mars missions (Score:4, Insightful)
That ain't the same. Those rocks first of all were subject to a heavy inpact collision, then traveled for years or millenia and finally had a fiery entrance into our atmosphere, only to survive another hard impact.
That's a bit like saying you saw an original Tin Lizzy when you just saw one that spent the last century on a scrapyard after it had a crash totalling it.
Yay for car analogies!
Re:Mars missions (Score:5, Informative)
I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Tucked away in a tiny corner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, ignored by most visitors, is a small display of a tiny rock.
You can touch this rock.
The description of the rock states that it is a meteorite from Mars that was collected in Antarctica [nasa.gov].
Re:Mars missions (Score:5, Funny)
I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Stop doing that.
You'll go blind.
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Re:Mars missions (Score:5, Funny)
I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Stop doing that. You'll go blind.
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Or gain superpowers!
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Or gain superpowers!
Touching it probably wouldn't be enough. But if there were an experiment being conducted in the next room which involved high levels of bertold radiation (normally deadly, but not in this case for some reason) at the same time he was touching the Mars rock...
Mars, God of War! (dramatic theme music as he proceeds immediately to invade Iran, episode ends with him giving the thumbs up and saying "Mission Accomplished").
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Man if you ignored the Iran bit that would make for a great superhero comic.
Hey, even the neocons need their superheroes. Given their tendency towards fantasy, I'm surprised they haven't come up with something like that already.
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Mars was also the god of farmers.
Stop making fun of my gods, you insensitive clod!
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The moon.
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That's nothing! I have eaten Mars. Repeatedly.
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Re:Mars missions (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it's not going to happen if the "No manned space program!" supporters get their way. Those supporters keep telling us that all science can be achieved without a manned space program. Yet we have yet to see a probe provide as much useful material, data, and support infrastructure for return missions as the manned space program. Can we send a probe to drill for soil? Sure.
Can we send a probe that will collect samples from all over the area, collect rocks in their original condition, and respond to scientists on the ground who get to review each sample before it is collected? Maybe. But it's a LONG way from having been proven yet. And there's still the aspect that Astronauts are able to return a significantly larger quantity for study.
Then there's the situation of the Hubble Telescope. That telescope would still be a floating piece of space junk if not for the repairs carried out by the manned space program.
"I can say unequivocally, that if it weren't for the human space program, Hubble would be a piece of orbiting space junk." --Ed Weiler, Chief Scientist, Hubble
At the end of the day, humans are more adaptable to situations, and can do the job better than automated systems. That's not to deprecate the role of robots in space, but the two are incredibly complementary. So please tell your favorite political candidate, we want the Constellation Project! :-)
Re:Mars missions (Score:4, Funny)
Can we send a probe to drill for soil? Sure.
No Blood For Soil!
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I dunno. Most of the science that we can do and should do, do not currently require manned expeditions to mars. Those include developing a sustainable living environment (which we have trouble doing here on earth) and faster modes of transportation (otherwise your asking for people to spend up to 10 years in space with minimal human contact).
I think the sustainable living environment is the biggest hurdle. We're still a long way from being able to develop the reliable, sustainable systems that will be necessary for long-term human space travel.
The ISS experience has given us some insight into just how difficult this problem is. On a long-term mission, something as simple as a failure in the toilet system could start a cascade of events that end in disaster.
From what I've seen so far, I seriously doubt that we're anywhere close to being able t
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Re:Mars missions (Score:5, Insightful)
Hubble cost about $2.5 billion to build and launch [wikipedia.org].
The Shuttle costs $1.3 billion per launch [wikipedia.org] at the rate of ~7 launches a year.
If there were no manned space program, NASA could've easily afforded to build and put a dozen HSTs in orbit.
The question isn't what can do the job better, the question is what can do the job most efficiently: i.e. effectiveness / cost. An unmanned Mars mission designed to return samples would probably also need to return a hundred kg in support equipment. A manned Mars mission would probably need to return several tons of equipment, people, and active life support equipment. Fuel requirements scale proportionately to payload weight so you've just increased the mission cost by one if not two orders of magnitude. Sure a person could do the job better, but is it really worth paying 10x-100x more for something a little better?
At this point in time, putting people in space is mostly a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire the population (or at least give them a sense of superiority over other nations). As much as we want the romantic notion of people traveling to the other planets, the technology just isn't there yet. Should we continue pouring most of our money into inflated mission costs just so we can say we have people up there? Or should we concentrate our money on cost-effectively experimenting and improving technology which could eventually be used to get people out to the planets and stars?
Nobody wants to kill off manned space travel. The goal of even an unmanned space program is to pave the way for people eventually going out there. What the anti-manned program people want is an increased emphasis on cost-effective research and experimental technology, and less on symbolic gestures. IMHO there is substantial PR value in having some sort of manned space program. A lot of people working in astronautics and the space program today wouldn't be there if there hadn't been a manned program that inspired them as a kid. But the NASA budget currently 3:1 in favor of manned space travel needs to swing the other way if we're really serious about developing space travel technology.
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I think that sort of thinking is why people want to see it now, rather than leaving it for our grandchildren's children.
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No, actually it does not scale proportionately. The fuel requirements grow exponentially with the mass of the payload for all self-propelled spacecraft due to the rocket equation [wikipedia.org]. For the rate of growth to be linear the energy for the propulsion would have to come from outside the system (e.g. ground-based).
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I double-checked the rocket equation before I posted. It says fuel requirement grows exponentially with desired delta-v, but is proportional to payload mass (approximation when fuel mass >> payload mass).
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"Hubble cost about $2.5 billion to build and launch [wikipedia.org].
The Shuttle costs $1.3 billion per launch [wikipedia.org] at the rate of ~7 launches a year."
You are correct about this. It would have been cheaper to launch multiple copies of Hubble than to service it. Note that all major telescopes after Hubble are designed NOT to be serviced. Seems the folks at NASA learned something. Launching a replacement is cheaper then service but more than that. Hubble had to be placed in a very non-optimal o
Re:Mars missions (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention the by-products.
Sure, robot explorers are cheaper. But think back to the 60s. Think of all the incredible discoveries that were made because of the hardships to get man into space! A ton of inventions are, directly or indirectly, a product of the space race.
Now, why would human space travel spur innovation? Because we're (drumroll) humans! An innovation for human space flight has to serve some human need. Robot technology, while at least putting some innovation behind robotics and other electronic appliances, cannot produce anything close to it.
We should start looking beyond the immediate usefulness of research. If we didn't have quantum physics, we wouldn't have lasers, and thus no DVDs. That's not what it was researched for, but that's something anyone is able to understand and consider useful.
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"Unfortunately, it's not going to happen if the "No manned space program!" supporters get their way. Those supporters keep telling us that all science can be achieved without a manned space program. Yet we have yet to see a probe provide as much useful material, data, and support infrastructure for return missions as the manned space program"
There WILL be a sample return mision long before a manned mission to mars. We we need to perfect the technology needed to lift off mars and return to Earth before we s
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Rocks from mars have been available for a while:
http://rocksfrommars.com/
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I can't wait for the first samples from Mars to be returned
I find it a bit scary. We could be infected with a new lifeform for which we have no natural immunities. Sure, the chances are small of this being the case, but it still could be a human-ending gamble. I'd suggest we build a moonbase with good labs and isolate the lab workers from Earth for a while.
Too bad (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad they're all fakes picked up from the driveway outside a soundstage in southern california. All those so called "scientists" and "NASA" will look so silly once people actually make it to the moon and find that it really is made of cheese. Demand for the gourmet "moon cheese" will cause overmining of the moon and an eventual orbital shift sometime in 2012 which will cause all female mammals on earth to have a massively synchronized ovulatory cycle which will end with the death of all the males.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Funny)
all female mammals on earth to have a massively synchronized ovulatory cycle which will end with the death of all the males.
I'm a little fuzzy on how exactly that is going to cause the males to die.
Does it involve all of us getting laid?
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Imagine 3 BILLION (pinky-to-mouth) women, all suffering from PMS at the same time.
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"Does it involve all of us getting laid?"
Hell's thermometers are reading several thousand degrees Fahrenheit, so no.
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Can't be. In Revelations 21:8 it says clearly "But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death."
A "fiery lake of burning sulfur" means at the very least liquid sulphur, or there is no lake. For sulfur to be liquid, it would require a temperature of no more than 832F.
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Not really.
Past the critical point [wikipedia.org] of 1314 K, 20.7 MPa, the liquid and gaseous phases merge.
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Ye gawds... I was trying to make a JOKE here, ok?
Geeks and religious fundies have one thing in common, they take fantasy stories WAY too serious.
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I think the mechanism he alludes to is the globally synchronized PMS that would inevitably precede. Much like a nuclear holocaust, the few unfortunate survivors would envy the dead.
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All of us except the Slashdot readers.
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Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
This is always my big objection to major conspiracy theories that involve the faking of an event observed by millions.
Even if only a few dozen or hundred people would have to be involved in faking something like the lunar landing or 9-11, the population of experts closely observing the events in question is enormous. Many of them could secure protection from governments or organizations opposed to the US or whatever power is in question. When you begin to total the number of people who would have to keep quiet on something like this, it gets absurd fast. Do we really believe that some shadow government is quietly faking thousands of papers on moon rocks carefully enough to avoid major contradictions over decades of publishing?
Not that the public isn't deceived all the time. But it happens in ways that are simultaneously more subtle and more blatantly obvious. Inducing apathy with a flood of partially true information works a lot better than engineering specific falsehoods.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, the conspiracy would be more complicated than the actual event.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, as an armchair activist, that kind of belief depresses me. There really are groups of evil powerful people manipulating the world toward their own ends. But when you start to believe that they're a cartoonish parody of villainy capable of controlling virtually every corner of society like it was an army, the response is just resignation. Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
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Everybody is always manipulating the world towards their own ends. Good and evil often mean little more than 'agrees with me' and 'doesn't agree with me'. The best, brightest, most decent person you know goes out and makes the world a better place. That is still manipulating it to their own ends.
Also, is an armchair activist someone who wishes they had principles to stand up for, I don't really understand what that means?
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The distinction is meaningless. Benefiting others makes them feel good or otherwise satisfies some urge of theirs, which is exactly a benefit to themselves.
It's a reasonable way to sort some good from some evil, but it is very hard to establish pure altruism, it is usually beneficial to the giver.
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It doesn't have to be 'pure' altruism, mutualism and commensalism (which I guess is partially altruistic) make more sense. It's parasitic behaviour (which can be considered 'evil' for our purposes) that causes issues here.
I would argue that the distinction, in terms of overall effect, between the benefits of stealing all your food and getting away with it while you starve to death, and getting warm fuzzies for sharing my surplus food with you, allowing both of us to survive until more food becomes available
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...benefits of stealing all someone else's food and getting away with it while they starve to death, sorry.
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The distinction is meaningless when trying to decide if they are manipulating the world to their own ends.
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Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
Personally, I would prefer if there was an Illuminati to contend with over the manipulations and abuses of power. Even a very-well hidden criminal/illegal organization that subtly manipulated many other organizations to perform counter-productive/destructive/disruptive acts is easier to combat than a large number of scattered small groups performing c-p/d/d acts for their personal gain. That single group controlling all the others will eventually make a slip that exposes them to be chipped away until they
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11. Profit!
Just don't Google Moon. (Score:2)
As shown in this YouTube video [youtube.com]. ;)
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It's not like any cheese I've ever tasted, Grommit.
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Oh well, my karma's been maxed out for years now.
Note to self (Score:4, Informative)
When we go go back: Take a shovel and bucket.
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...and while you're there, bring us back some local dancers!
Earth's surface Changes? (Score:1)
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Re:Earth's surface Changes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Earth's surface Changes? (Score:4, Informative)
Even though the surface of earth changes, but I dont thing the stuff (rocks etc) just disappear. They still remain on earth. So, why can't they be used to find anything about the universe?
Mainly because bits of the surface are constantly being subducted into the core of the earth and melting into the general magma soup. The entire surface is also constantly subjected to erosion and weathering, which breaks rock down both physically and chemically. They are slow processes, but we're talking about ~4.5 billion years. That is enough time for pretty well the entire surface of the earth to have been destroyed and reformed several times over.
A sample from the moon is largely an unaltered and uncontaminated record from the moment it first solidified as rock.
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A sample from the moon is largely an unaltered and uncontaminated record from the moment it first solidified as rock.
I dare to challenge that. The moon is subject to constant (with "constant" on a cosmic timescale) bombardment, asteroids hitting it left and right, so I wouldn't say this is unaltered or uncontaminated in any sense. You may argue that those rocks are most likely also as old, or at least "old enough" to keep the sample in a somewhat pure state, but if you really want ancient matter from the da
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Yes, I was careful to say "largely" unaltered and uncontaminated. Not just because of impact bombardment, I also had cosmic ray bombardment in mind. A significant impact would melt some rocks in the immediate vicinity, but in general it would only contaminate the surface of most rocks. So you test the rock interiors, and rocks which have been melted like that will clearly test out differently and can be rejected. I think cosmic ray bombardment is the more significant issue to be concerned with, but with car
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I'm just saying that we shouldn't assume everything on the Moon being "of the Moon" as well. You know just how quickly people jump on stories they want to hear. Imagine a dirtball going poof on the moon, we dig it out and the next headline reads "we found water and methane on the Moon!"
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One word: volcanism.
The Earth has it, the moon does not.
Elementary geology tell us that the composition and structure of the rocks changes when it undergoes igneous or metamorphic transformations, meaning we can not trust anything that we can reach to be in its "original" state. If nothing we can access on Earth is guaranteed to be "original", then no, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the origins of the Universe.
The moon, on the other hand, is pretty much the same as it was when it first formed (save fo
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Even on the Moon the Grammar Nazis will still find you.
Have you considered that perhaps the OP's native language was, in fact, other than English? The beauty of English is that you can mangle it in every which way and still be perfectly understandable. You understood him fine. Otherwise you'd not be able to "correct" his post. You're just a jerk. I bet you're a wikiadmin in your spare time -- if
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I admit that English is a fluid language, making it awkward to correct authoritatively. Heinlein dropped the use of "the" in the book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. However, this style is non-standa
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Loonie is perfectly good variant of English, tovarisch.
Hrm... (Score:3, Funny)
We really should stop outsourcing dirt from other planets to fill out dirt needs. Think of the economy!
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But its the only way the Earth will be able to compete in the Solar economy. But don't worry, someday it will come full circle, and the Martians will be coming here looking for our rocks!
We're whalers on the moon. (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude, where did you go to school? Everyone knows the moon is made out of green cheese [planetfusion.co.uk].
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842 pounds of fragments of another world rare? (Score:3, Funny)
You mean compared to the 5.9736 × 10^24 kg of Earth?
Who'da thunk it?
Old as it gets (Score:4, Funny)
"By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets.""
So true. Even when John McCain was a kid, he could look up in the night sky and see the moon.
McCain's view (Score:1)
Every time a political career fails, a new crater appears on the moon. Of course, most failures are too small to see, even if we think they are important. Local elections generate moon dust. You need a Ceasar undergoing an ambitionectomy to just make it visible. The really big craters probably occurred when there were only a few humans. Say about 4004 BC.
So now you understand the background behind election talk, the inner message.
Talk of "Impact".
Talk of "Give me a ri
Old news (Score:2)
Andromeda Strain? (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked in the photo labs at Johnson Space Center (Nasa Houston) back in 1972 and was told that when Apollo 11 returned, Nasa had the Lunar Receiving Laboratory set up like a Fort Dietrich style germ warfare lab. Apparently there was actually concern that the rocks could harbor harmful microbes. This may have all been an urban legend of the time - I'm not sure. In any case, the photo techs thought this was pretty funny, since the boxes that the Hasselblad film cassettes were returned in were full of moon dust and it stuck to everything.
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I worked in the photo labs at Johnson Space Center (Nasa Houston) back in 1972 and was told that when Apollo 11 returned, Nasa had the Lunar Receiving Laboratory set up like a Fort Dietrich style germ warfare lab.
I've heard the same. Found this written by a Judy Allton from Lockheed regarding the return of moon rocks:
In 1965 a committee of the Space Science Board reviewed the need for a lunar sample receiving laboratory and recommended a laboratory of restricted scope. This committee also raised the question of quarantine for lunar samples until they proved to be biologically harmless.
"But as plans for managing the samples developed, NASA came under pressure from space biologists and the U.S. Public Health Service to protect earth against the introduction of alien microorganisms that might exist in lunar soil. What would have been a small laboratory designed to protect lunar samples against contamination grew into an elaborate, expensive quarantine facility that greatly complicated operations on the early lunar landing missions." (Compton, 1989).
It seems like paranoia, but despite the expense and pain it's a healthy one, in my opinion. There may come a time when such restraint really does save our asses. Being in my late 30's I wonder if it will be in my lifetime, however :-) Rest of it at:
http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/lnews/lnjul94/hist25.htm [nasa.gov]
-Aaron
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But that was no official moon dust and thus not harmful. Didn't you get the memo?
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Indeed, there was a concern - but mostly among the Nervous Nellies, not among serious scientists. The LRL (which indeed was setup more-or-less as you describe, which you could easily verify with a moment of googling) was a fig leaf to cover those concerns.
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Moon rocks are very important (Score:2, Funny)
They are the only way that I know of to successfully get the Avatar to Britania and back.
Ebay (Score:1)
"...where nothing ever happens..." (Score:2)
"It's hard to wrap your mind around a place where nothing ever happens," Mr. Allen said.
Okay everybody - use this comment as a jumping-off point to rag on your job/office/co-workers...
My dream mission (Score:2)
I'd love to see a sample return mission from Titan. The delta-v requirements would be stupendous, but just imagine finding a whole alternative biochemistry based on liquid methane.
That's "science" alright ... (Score:1, Insightful)
If there's a 20-million-year margin of error, then they certainly do not 'know the ages of moon rocks'. It really is pathetic what society tolerates/accepts when it comes to "science".
Re:That's "science" alright ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a matter of scale. When you're dealing with 4-5 billion years, what's 20 million years? 0.5% error margin sounds quite good to me.
The article is actually crap...and (Score:4, Informative)
some of the NYT comments are worse. The guy touted a lunar sample mission by the Russians and they certainly didn't bring any lunar rocks back during the height of the space race and quite honestly I don't think anyone has brought anything back since the astronauts picked them and returned them.
Some of the other stuff, too, is the claim that 800 lbs of lunar geology is enough to tell the story of the moon. We still get cannot get the earth's story straight, geologically speaking, and we're standing on the samples! There's been no systematic mineral assay, no samples in the mountains, no samples in the big caves thought to be on the moon, no samples from the polar regions and really, not much at all.
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The guy touted a lunar sample mission by the Russians and they certainly didn't bring any lunar rocks back during the height of the space race and quite honestly I don't think anyone has brought anything back since the astronauts picked them and returned them.
Luna 16, 20, and 24 were successful Soviet lunar sample return missions. Luna 24 took place after Apollo 17 (which was the last time an astronaut was on the moon).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_programme [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17 [wikipedia.org]
If only (Score:2)
If only there was a way we could get more of them.
But not for Civilians (Score:3, Informative)
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Moon rocks? Big deal. (Score:2)
Fucking rocks, Neil? I don't know if you noticed before you left, but the earth is made of fucking rock. Oh, but this is "moon rock" you say? And this is "earth rock." Did you hear that rock has gone up three points on the market? No, it didn't, because it's fucking rock! We wanted diamonds or sherbet, or a squirrel with a flute, Neil!
-Eddie Izzard.
I Got To Hold One... (Score:2)
My wife teaches fifth grade. A few years back, as part of her science curriculum, she was able to get a moon rock on loan from NASA for her classroom. I was amazed at how (seemingly) simple it was - she (and the school) had to sign some papers, and they left it with her for a week. I came in after class one day to see it -- I was pretty amazed to actually be holding a moon rock in my hands. As I recall, it was from one of the later Apollo moon missions, but still very cool.
Moon rock looks like powdered brownies (Score:2)