Radar Images Suggest There's a Tunnel On the Moon (gizmodo.com) 58
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: A team of researchers think they've discovered a cave on the Moon in radar images of the lunar surface, which they posit could be a future site for an established human presence on our rocky satellite. The tunnel is in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) pit, the deepest known pit on the Moon. (If the name is familiar to you, the Sea of Tranquility is where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969.) The pit formed due to a lava tube's roof collapse or a collapse of a void structure created by tectonic processes. To look for potential cave structures within the pit, the researchers studied side-looking radar images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Mini-RF instrument between 2009 and 2011. The team then conducted 3D radar simulations of potential geometries of the pit and its cave, to determine that the brightness they saw in radar images could be due to subsurface features. Ultimately, the team determined there is a tunnel in the pit that is between 98 feet (30 meters) long and 262ft (80m) long. The tunnel is roughly 148ft (45m) wide and is either flat or inclined with a maximum steepness of 45 degrees. "The exploration of lunar caves through future robotic missions could provide a fresh perspective on the lunar subsurface and yield new insights into the evolution of lunar volcanism," the team wrote in the paper. "Furthermore, direct exploration could confirm the presence of stable subsurface environments shielded from radiation and with optimal temperature conditions for future human utilization."
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Genesis Torpedo (Score:2)
Stage One of our experiments was conducted in the laboratory. Stage Two of the series will be attempted in a l
Re: (Score:2)
Funny thing is they actually had food replicators by then, so food supply and to a lesser extent population were not big issues.
I do wonder about robotic exploration. NASA has a series of robotic rovers on Mars, and is in theory headed back to the moon this decade. Japan has demonstrated the ability to do a precision landing in a target area entirely automatically, even if it did subsequently tip over.
Build a wall, underground, and make lunarians pay (Score:4, Funny)
Fucking far side lunarians coming to take the jobs of hard-working Earth-siders. I am absolutely fed up with our beloved Earth-side being overrun by those far-siders. Our lunar boundaries are a joke, and it's high time we stop pretending otherwise. These people breach our craters, violating our laws, and what do they get? They get pampered by the lunar liberals, who would rather see our colony plunge into disorder than uphold an ounce of order and respect for our regulations.
Far-siders are a drain on our moon's resources. They come here and take jobs that should be going to Earth-side residents. Jobs that our hardworking lunar citizens desperately need. Instead, these lawbreakers work for crumbs, driving down lunar wages and making it impossible for honest Earth-siders to make a decent living. It's an insult to every lunar settler who follows the rules, contributes to our moonbase, and tries to build a life for themselves and their families.
And don't even get me started on the crime. How many times do we have to hear about another Earth-side life ruined by someone who shouldn't even be here? The moon liberals will tell you it's just a few bad apples, but that's a lie. The truth is, we have no idea who these people are, where they come from, or what they're capable of. Our lunar habitats are less safe because of them. Our children are less safe because of them.
Our lunar schools are overwhelmed with non-Earth-side speaking children. Teachers are forced to slow down the curriculum to accommodate them, while our own kids fall behind. It's a disgrace. And who pays for all this? We do. The Earth-side taxpayer. We foot the bill for their education, their healthcare, their welfare. They come here with nothing and expect us to take care of them. It's unsustainable and it's unfair.
The moon liberals love to paint far-siders as poor, innocent souls just looking for a better life. But what about our own citizens looking for a better life? What about the veterans of the Lunar Wars sleeping in craters? What about the single parents working double shifts in the oxygen farms to make ends meet? What about the millions of Earth-siders who are struggling every day? Why are they less deserving of our help and our resources?
We need to take a stand. We need to build the dome, enforce our immigration laws, and deport every single far-sider in our territory. No more amnesty. No more sanctuary domes. No more handouts. If you want to come to Earth-side, do it legally. Respect our laws, our culture, and our people. Otherwise, you have no place here.
It's time to put Earth-side first. It's time to reclaim our moon. Enough is enough. This is our home, and we will not let it be destroyed by those who have no respect for it. We will not be silenced, and we will not be stopped. The era of open craters and unchecked far-side immigration is over. It's time to make Earth-side safe, prosperous, and great once again.
Re: (Score:1)
You lunarians are welcome to follow our generous laws which allow hundreds of thousands of you to enter our atmosphere annually. Legally. The problem is when you enter the bright side illegally and then expect us to provide you housing, jobs and other resources never provided to anyone else in the past on this or any other planetary body.
Re:Build a wall, underground, and make lunarians p (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Except its not funny and hasn't been for a couple of decades. Its just a standard [insert name here] [name] cut and paste job that were clever when they were first written but arn't when used by idiots to try and look clever. And if you think there were no political overtones then how naive are you. No one cuts and pastes (he sure as hell didn't write it himself) something that long from a generator for a quick laugh.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He deserves it. While the moon has a near side and a far side, it doesn't have a bright side.
Re: (Score:3)
Hold up, Earther. Let's unpack this whole "far-side Lunarians stealing your jobs" thing. You act like we're waltzing in and taking over the regolith mines. Newsflash: those mines are a nightmare. Who exactly is lining up for hours in a dusty, cramped cave chipping away at rocks for a handful of credits? You Earthers wouldn't touch those jobs with your fancy vectran gloves.
Don't get me started on the crime. You Earth siders act like we're the ones running protection rackets in the hab units. The real problem
Re: (Score:2)
Damn - now I'm trying to remember the names of the Trees.
"'Cuz we're better'n you!" (Score:2)
That would seem to be the logical conclusion of your clearly expressed opinion. Burn any good books/crosses lately?
Re: (Score:2)
I was gonna go with lunar alien cartels from Phobos running drugs, but this one is great too.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Probably, but anyone who enters is necessarily bringing with then enough CHON (plus a few other things, like Fe and Ca) to maintain a human body. So if the recycling system is good enough and there is enough spare electricity, then this is just a matter of re-balancing things enough. And if there's a demand for their skill set, then they are a useful pair of hands.
That said, the system is going to NEED some slack, and is going to need to calculate how much slack is available.
OTOH, the immigration will nec
Re: (Score:2)
This is the sort of place that the DARPA Subterranean Challenge should send the winners' robots. If you've never heard of it you should check it out, it's incredibly cool.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/darp... [ieee.org]
Of course the blimp and quadcopter scouts will be useless, but with minor adaptations for the change in gravity the legged and wheeled rovers should work the same as here. Rather than sealing the joints against water incursion they'll need to keep the dust out of course, but the mapping, sampling, and mes
Re: (Score:3)
Iâ(TM)ve got a bad feeling about thisâ&# (Score:2)
Cue space slug
Of course there is a tunnel (Score:1)
unlikely to be a tunnel (Score:4, Funny)
It is far more likely to be an old whaling station.
Re: (Score:2)
It is far more likely to be an old whaling station.
But there ain't no whales, so they tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune!
https://youtu.be/U8V2U7vTys0?s... [youtu.be]
Re: unlikely to be a tunnel (Score:2)
Doesnâ(TM)t mean there whaling stations. Where else would they store the harpoons they carry?
Silurian hypothesis? (Score:4, Informative)
Nice clickbait, dickbag. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes it's a lava tunnel, i.e. a cave. And that may make it the most valuable real estate on the moon.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also interesting that the discovery of this particular cave (assuming they're right) comes from re-examining 15 year old data.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't seem to claim any such thing. The article specifically states "A team of researchers think they’ve discovered a cave on the Moon" and then goes on to say how they did it.
You and the OP, being part of what's killing slashdot, immediately jump on your cynical bandwagon to find something to be needlessly outraged about.
So good job, you've expressed your pointless outrage and added to the reasons why I can't even be bothered to log into slashdot anymore and only looked at this article because
Re: (Score:2)
That's a popular trope. And as is common with popular tropes, it is absolutely raddled with wildly optimistic guesswork.
Firstly - the walls will be riddled with porosity (technical term ; in popular language, "holes") on all scales - from "human-can-walk-in" to sub-millime
Elon's secret Boring Project found! (Score:1)
As if he was really seriously building a tunnel under Vegas as an end goal?
He sent his car into space to be the first vehicle to drive his lunar tunnel.
This is of course in between stalking drinkypoo and running 2 major companies.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
A 'cave' is not a tunnel. (Score:3)
Unnecessary superlatives are unnecessary.
This discovery is cool enough already.
Moon caves (Score:2)
Moon caves are fifties era comic book themes. They went to the moon often before they actually went there. It was cool.
Re: (Score:2)
Or earlier. The Heinlein short story "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon" was from 1949 and even earlier Burrough's "The Moon Maid" mentions them in 1922.
I wonder if kids today read those kind of books anymore. Not great literature but great adventure stories for an 8 year old kid.
Re: (Score:2)
Pff, I've seen some of the books the kids get to read these days. I wish for the great adventure stories too.
Good job. You found Elvis (Score:3)
And here he thought he'd finally found a nice quiet place. Instead, you found his front door [youtube.com].
Did they find the Bubbul frog in the cave? (Score:2)
If not, then it must be a monster den, not a cave.
Slug (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A cave is not a tunnel. (Score:1)
Clickbait.
A tunnel is an artificial underground passage, I thought they finally found proof of alien activities.
Re: (Score:2)
Please provide your sources. I just looked at a couple of online dictionaries and a musty old dead-tree dictionary. All of them define a tunnel simply as "an underground passage". None of them said anything about needing to be artificial.
Just to be sure, I looked up "passage", too. One sense of the definition is used as a caving term, so that's not necessarily artificial either.
Re: (Score:2)
That's odd. The term that bothers me is "cave", which I tend to think of as requiring water eroding stuff. Tunnel seems fine.
Re: (Score:2)
"Tunnel" is just a shape des
Re: (Score:2)
I forgot that Slashcode doesn't understand "hr" tags either. Just another thing to add to it's litany of abysmalities.
I'll spell my name correctly (RÃckdÃctor), and Rei's with the necessary thorns (Ã,Ã) and our currencies too (â, £), just to piss Slashcode's non-existent maintainer off.
Oh, hang on - is .IS on the Euro, or some IS-Crown like the Noggins? ISK rings a mental bell.
and the 'jerb' creators (Score:1)
Secret Nazi moon base finally discovered! (Score:4, Insightful)
James Bond (Score:1)
Looking forward to the next Bond movie - "Welcome to my underground Moon lair. My henchmen and I will now leave you alone to die in an unnecessarily elaborate contraption that you can escape from quite easily at the last minute due to an obvious flaw in it's design unless you pay us 1 MILLION dollars." I guess that would be more Austin Powers than James Bond but it will be good ether way.
The sorry state of science education (Score:2)
"If the name is familiar to you, the Sea of Tranquility is where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969." How in hell is this not familiar to everyone?
Re: The sorry state of science education (Score:2)
Kinda like (Score:2)
Swiss cheese?
Re: (Score:2)
What does Microsoft Security have to do with this?
lava tube in Oregon (Score:5, Informative)
NASA is an outdated and corrupt bureaucracy (Score:2)
If and when we ever get back to the moon, which isn't certain given how corrupt, ineffective and self-serving NASA really is.