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Science

No dust plume from Lunar Prospecter 145

Posted by Hemos from the no-water-no-life dept.
Calmacil writes "Lunar Prospector hit the moon, and made no dust plume. Thus, no water was found :( "Darnit, there goes my moon base.
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No dust plume from Lunar Prospecter More

No dust plume from Lunar Prospecter

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  • Cute. But you could at least include one link. How about something about the monoliths [duke.edu] or 2001 concepts [2001principle.net] or 2001 in Clarke's works [palantir.net] or mention that the book explains a lot of things which a narrator in the movie would have mentioned.

  • First Man Buried on the Moon! (Score:3)

    by Matter Eating Lad ( 66251 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @04:22PM (#1771969)
    The real story here is that there's a new man on the moon... Eugene Shoemaker!!! Some of his ashes were carried by the spacecraft. Must admit I teared up at the thought of good old Eugene finally making it to the Moon.

    Here's a blurb... [geekculture.com]

  • And if water was discovered on the moon what we do with it? Bring it back, bottle it and sell it for $2000/pint?, Designer Vodka? A lunar ice sculpture for Bill Gates's daughter's wedding?
  • I can see some valid reasons for worrying, if the coffin broke open, his ashes spilled into the water, and the Monolith reconstituted & reanimated him.

    Burial on the moon isn't going to cause much of a problem, IMHO. Zombies, though, are another matter.

  • There's a manned mars mission at http://www.ungabunga.com
  • Oh, that's just utter nonsense. People who complain about the cost of NASA are simply displaying their complete ignorance of the US Federal Budget, of which NASA comprises far less than 1%. NASA's total funding for a year is about the same as ONE stealth bomber.

    You want to "improve the US"? Find someplace to cut *real* money, not the microscopic amount of chump change that gets spent on useful things like NASA.

    People who go around whining about their delusions that NASA costs a lot are simply uneducated morons.
  • yea but they also named the second one TMA2 and that was no way near the moon ;)
  • The moon is a cinder? nothing there?
    Ohh you are mistaken my friend...
    Where else can you rain nuclear hell on all nations of the earth without having to suffer the concequences??

    The moon? A perfect military location to destroy mankind!

  • Or we can do everything at once (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You see, it isn't the way it works with the government. They can't make a list saying "Okay, we'll do this, then this, then this." So it isn't feasable to do our priorities first (read carefully). If we did do our priorities first, we would never do anything else because you can't really get done with the priorities.

    So what they do instead, because they are pretty smart, is do more than one thing at the same time. Even though we are making missions to the moon, we are also lessening the budget, getting people off welfare, feeding the hungary, and causing international crisises (toungue and cheek, not serious, really!).

    So saying that we shouldn't do stuff in space because we have better things to do is nonsense because we are doing the better things too.

    If you are familiar with logic then think logical AND instead of logical OR.

    Kevin Holmes
    "extrasolar"
    (didn't log in for some reason)
  • Even if there is no water found, the only thing that is proven is that there is no water in that particular crater. It's like landing a craft in the middle of the Sahara Desert and saying there are no trees on Earth.
    What we should do is send people back. Better than robots - which usually raise more questions than they answer - people can go back out and do some more research.
    This time though lets make it worth the trip. Lets put the scientists up there intead of the test pilots. Considering that the last time out of 12 men...the last man to step onto the moon was a qualified geologist...
  • If you had been able to build your moonbase, would it have been an evil moonbase?
    --
  • Well, yes, the existance of water on the moon already would be an enormous benefit because that would considerably cut down both the cost of transporting materials, and also the complete dependence of any lunar base on the Earth.
  • Actually, wouldn't the result with the biggest visible plume be if the spacecraft missed the cater altogether?
    The crater depth is about 5km.. If the craft crashed right into the bottom, then the visible pume wouln't be as big, and most of the pume would be contined in the crater..

  • No, it wasn't the biodome. The people in the biodome stayed in for a year or more IIRC, and were later found to have had outside help in that time. The NASA project kept a 4 person team completely self contained for 3 months; it is actually a proof of concept for a manned Mars mission (if they ever raise that kind of money).
  • Perhaps they should hurl that modeul they recovered from the ocean (the Grissom one) at Redmond and study the plume that wafts up.
    Indeed. A great deal of scientific advancement would be yielded from such a blow. "Examining Redmond for Signs of Intelligent Life"
  • No dust plume is good. It did not hit the crater wall. 21 observatories are analyzing their photos/instruments to figure out if water vapor is there.

  • Still, some good accomplished (Score:3)

    by DarkClown ( 7673 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @01:59PM (#1771992) Homepage
    At least NASA is recycling unused materials from previous missions that wouldn't have been used otherwise. Perhaps they should hurl that module they recovered from the ocean (the Grissom one) at Redmond and study the plume that wafts up.
  • There was no dust plume because of the specific place of impact, but that doesn't mean there is no water in there...

  • Re:Not proven. (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @02:27PM (#1771994) Journal
    NASA/AMES news release extract [nasa.gov] says there was no plume, and analysis may require several days. Hitting the crater wall was more likely to kick up dust horizontally. The best result which could cause a dust plume would have been if the impact hit a buried chunk of ice, suddently converting the remaining energy into an underground steam explosion. I wouldn't mind if it hit a frozen lake, giving off nothing but an isolated thunderstorm with scattered solar panel flurries.

    Amateurs with scopes up to 31 inches saw nothing, other than 3 reports of a brief flash nearby. Such flashes have been reported at other times when mountains are illuminated as the Moon rotates, or assorted rocks hit. Even now at lunar noon we're viewing the south pole area at a low angle which increases the chances of reflections. Whatever the flash was, it is unusual enough that it's interesting.

  • Would water really be an essential resource if
    one wants to build a station on the moon? If
    you want to do something useful there you would
    have to build large transport capacities anyway.
    With enough energy it should be possible to
    recycle the water by distillation or electrolyses.
    To get enough food to the moon should be more
    difficult then to substitute the water losses.

    In the first place you need a lot of money and
    that seems to be the main reason for these
    spectacular experiments ...

  • Don't give up yet (Score:4)

    by Scurrilous Knave ( 66691 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @02:29PM (#1771996) Homepage
    Don't give up on that moonbase just yet, Hemos. Check out the info on the Artemis Project [asi.org] web site. They intend to establish a permanent moonbase within the next several years, and start commercial tourist flights soon thereafter. All totally private, no government involvement. Where is the money coming from? To quote their FAQ, "shameless commercialism"! They have a pretty convincing business plan, that results in ordinary slobs like me being able to take a vacation on the moon within my lifetime. They need skills of all sorts, so go see 'em.
  • NASA wouldn't want to file the Environmental Impact Statement on that one...whole lotta' methane & bovine fecal coliform bacteria...
  • Try this one if accessing the NY Times Website because of a Slashdot article:

    login: slashdotid
    password: slashdot

  • (It all started when somebody noticed that the commercials sold during the televised coverage of the Apollo-11 mission would have paid for the entire Apollo program.)

    This can't be right. The Apollo program cost $24 billion in pre-inflation 1960s dollars.

  • If that craft hit hard enough does that make him "the man in the moon"?
    Seriously, though, I hope the container in which they put his ashes has remained intact. We have far too much to learn about the moon to be mixing anything non-lunar into it yet. For the same reason I'm not to thrilled with the idea of doing any non-archeological digging there (i.e., mining)until we've "mined" all the knowledge first.

  • Or try:

    Login: qqqqq
    Pass: qqqqq

    Not so much finger movement, I've got lazy fingers.

    Makes me wonder though, it would be neat (for their marketing purposes and/or as a show of this community's elegance) for us to all use slashdot, slashdot.

    Goes back to NYT [nytimes.com], tries slashdot, slashdot.

    Hey, who's got the password for slashdot?



  • Although I suppose with 1/6 gravity there might be to high a drowning risk to have a shower.

    I did have hopes for regular toilets ;-)

  • I believe the figures that Mr. Bennett cited were the returns from the first Star Trek movie. They were, what--forty million? A hundred and forty? I don't recall. But they were more than the Pioneer and Voyager space probe programs (not Apollo) cost in their entirety--spacecraft, launches, ground operations for twenty years, etc. Which got some folks to thinking whether you could fund a moon base by making a movie about trying to get there. I believe that was one of the prime foundations of Artemis, and entertainment revenues still make up a large part of their initial funding. Those living in Los Angeles usually are aware firsthand of what big business entertainment really is; others may be, but often only peripherally.

  • Good.. (Score:3)

    by Uart ( 29577 ) <feedback&life-liberty-property,com> on Saturday July 31, 1999 @07:55PM (#1772010) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad it didn't work, because if it did, Al Gore would have taken credit for inventing the moon.

    But seriously, I was hoping for a moonbase too... I guess I'll have to bring some bottled water or something... And I would need plenty of it for my moon-penguins..... muahaha
  • > Whatever the flash was, it is unusual enough that it's interesting.

    A flying saucer scurrying for cover. We've inadvertantly destroyed their little green moon base, and now there'll be hell to pay for it.

  • Does he mention that the dazzle patterns that set our species on the track to civilization were merely the screen saver? We missed the intended message.

  • > To get enough food to the moon should be more
    > difficult then to substitute the water
    > losses.

    Give water, you can grow food.
  • Well, right now, we just don't know, one way or the other. if there is *a good reason* why there might be watter on the moon, the we should look. If someone just randomly said "there might be watter on the moon" with no resonable theory, it would be diffrent.

    I *cannot* think of a good analagy right now, damn.
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • an imporntant thing to remember is, you can't *actualy* use watter for fule. when you burn hydrogen, you create water. If you got that hydrogen from pure water to begin with, it means that at some point, you needed to crack that water into hydrogen and oxegen. The amount of energy that you get out will always be less then you put in. No matter what. I don't know why they are saying that they could use this water as fuel, unless NASA knows how to beat the second law of thermodynamics....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • There IS water on the moon (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The rocks brought back buy the Apollo missions
    showed that there is water. When you crush a moon
    rock then heat it, you will get aprox. 1 ml of water for 1 kilo of rock. So 1000 kilograms(1 metric ton) of lunar regolith will yeild 1 liter
    of water. Thats not very much but it is there.
  • He was, by a private company. but only into orbit, and they came back down, anyway.
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • a few ounces of human ashes is not going to "contaminate" the whole moon. and anything that you could find out from one chunk of moon, you could ether find out from another, or isn't really worth knowing
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Actually, isn't the canonical login/pw to any website that requires a free login ID cypherpunks/cypherpunks?
  • You're thinking about the "Mars Direct" [nw.net] project, headed by Robert Zubrin.

    It's similar in approach to the Artemis Project, but at last hearing, wasn't a commercial venture. Still, I'd pony up cash for pay-per-view of a manned Mars landing, and I'd bet a lot of fellow geeks would as well...

  • ummmmm, just because there is no atmosphere doesnt mean something smashing into the moon wouldnt kick up dirt. the lunar landers kicked up dust when they landed.
  • when you burn hydrogen, you create water.

    As an alchemist, your speaking of thermodynamics evokes all the sense of the astrologer pulling on Newtonian gravity to construct the bogus profundity of planetary convergence.

    Do demonstrate this fulmination of hydrogen in a vacuum . . .perhaps try inhaling some and setting your hair alight. I'd be interested if your nose should drip.
  • Don't give up yet! For those who have been following this story, you'll note that while amateur astronomers were asked to go out in droves just in case, neither the amateurs nor the professionals were ever expecting a visible plume. They were, however, expecting to obtain spectometric readings to detect water. Thus, a determination of whether water was found or not will not be possible for days or even weeks.

    Of course, if no water is detected, this is still not proof that there is no water on the moon - only that there is no water at the crash site, or at least not a detectable quantity. Don't give up hope on that moonbase yet Hemos!

  • yes you can recycle water. as you can with all chemicals. the reason water is essential is because you need it to make food. for example:

    you could bring up lots of food and water---> that would cost alot.

    there is a dollar amount placed on every unit of mass(lbs or kg) drug up to space. i don't recall what it is, but i do remember that it was very expensive.

    water has a mass of 1kg per liter. for every liter of water they find on the moon, they save that much money

    plus if they find enought water on the moon it will make it easier to grow food.



  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • www.shoemaker.mooncreature.com?
  • Ahh but you can use e.g. solar energy to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen. Its a whole lot easier to load liquid gases onto a spaceship than a bunch of sunlight.....
  • And how much will it cost to ship the solar cells to the Moon? The electrical energy output is very low, it'd take acres of solar cells to generate enough liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to lift anything of consequence off the lunar surface.
    Make them on the moon you say? Ever look at just how much it takes to refine silicon and make solar cells, lots of water and electricity needed.

    The Moon is a cinder, there's nothing there worth the trip.
  • Perhaps we're all the result of a similar burial of an early Martian astronaut ... Makes you think, doesn't it? :-)
  • There have been many different "but.."s posted, and i want to add my own to the list. here are the ones ive seen:

    1) Dust cloud would be bad. they wanted a water vapor cloud

    2) even if it did make a vapor cloud it will take months to analyze their data properly..

    3) (this ones mine) there was only a 10% chance of success for this mission, so just because there was no vapor cloud, doesnt mean there wasn't any water there..

    4) ..or anywhere else (someone elses, but a corrollary to mine)
  • As long as the Artemis project continues to focus on the shuttle, they don't have any significant hope of meeting its low-cost objectives, or even of getting into space at all because of shuttle politics.

    Only the alternative reusable launchers (still on the drawing board) offer the kind of cost and independence that a project of this kind requires.
    For now, that is. After nanotech, all the rules change.
  • Are there similar commercial ventures but targetted at Mars?
  • Inadvertantly????? are you kidding, this is a huge conspiracy, and NASA is fighting an extra-terrestrial war without even telling us about it.

    They have to cover the bombings up as something... expect more crafts to "crash" into the moon in search for "water" soon...

    :-)
  • Hey, they (the little green men) struck first. Remember that mars probe that 'disappeared'?

    Don't forget about those rockets that are 'exploding' for 'no apparent reason' or 'software bugs'; it's actually part of the conspiracy: As the rockets are blowing up they're actually firing shells of a sort at various planets, masked by the explosion. Pretty sneaky, eh? :)

  • The best result which could cause a dust plume would have been if the impact hit a buried chunk of ice, suddently converting the remaining energy into an underground steam explosion.



    ...converting the moon's atmosphere into a viable human-breathable one within MOMENTS of impact?
    Oh, wait, that's only if Arnold was there :-)

  • Re:water and fuel (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Sunday August 01, 1999 @07:28AM (#1772047) Journal
    You are assuming that solar cells are the only power source. There's also unfiltered sunlight which can be focused as a heat source to drive a turbine (generate electricity), heat lunar soil (releasing gases from the soil and refining metals), or crack water (high heat can break water into hydrogen and oxygen).

    Imagine the kind of mirrors that can be built in 0.6 G...

  • Yeah, but NASA is a member agency, of the government.. a separate, subordinate arm.

    It's not supposed to care about feeding the poor or ending the need for welfare.. it's the arm of the government that cares about space exploration and development. NASA competes with other programs for money.. it isn't empowered to take money away from social services and such. You're going on like NASA has a voting seat in Congress and actively tries to take food out of babies' mouths when in fact, its bugdet is just as much in jeopardy in any given year as any other program (and often much more so).

    The idea here is that NASA is subservient to higher powers in the government and this goverment's main job is coordinate execution of plans to reach as many goals as possible given a specific amount of revenue.
  • Well, Super Bowl commercial expenses [sportingnews.com] for 1999 were $92.8 million U.S. 1999 dollars. So about 258 Super Bowls to get $24 billion (ignoring inflation and viewership).

    Artemis estimates $1.4 billion for commercial moon trip [asi.org] and points out that computers make engineering much cheaper than in Apollo days. [asi.org]

    1.4 billion is 15 Super Bowls. But we're restricting our view here of how much money is available for projects. Just a glance at Yahoo Business News [yahoo.com] and I see $400 million in one aircraft sale deal.

  • Actually, yes, the book does mention what the monolith does to the primates.
  • Maybe there are also monkeys, bug spray and hookers on the moon. If there is water than the monkeys and hookers will have something to drink. But there are no clouds which is good. There is nothing sadder than a wet hooker. The monkeys don't really mind though. The water may be necessary to dilute the bug spray.
  • It is far too late to avoid contaminating the Moon with Earth bacteria. Things leak off the Earth all the time, and every major thunderstorm currently wandering across the globe is accelerating air, water, and bacteria into the upper atmosphere. Some of that stuff gets blown off and pushed by the solar wind across the Solar system. Of course it gets dried up in the process, but some bacteria and viruses survives that. There's even argument as to whether Earth's first life form originally appeared on Earth or Mars.

  • Re:Gee, Who'd have guessed? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    come on, money well spent? I am very pleased to see my tax dollars going to NASA and a mission like this exploring the potiential of space and finding nothing. Atleast we're looking beyond and not just standing idle be thinking "let's not waste money, there is probably nothing there." That kind of arrogance is dangerous.
  • I read somewhere that the last burn was too hot/long. The thing probably hit the wall. If there was water, Prospector flew over it.
  • We need a source of hydrogen and Oxygen to produce rocket-fuel, generate atmosphere, power generation, etc... carting this up would be a pain in the butt, plus become so expensive that Comrade Clinton would even freak at it.

    Oh, dont start dreaming of ion propulsion strong enough to leave a gravity well, that aint gonna happen in the next 100 years, we're gonna have to rely on good old newtons.... Make a long explosion in a closed vessel to propel the projectile foreward... I.E. Hydrogen burning, earth(moon?) shaking, fire breathing rocket engines... Hoo Yaa!

    we need it for fuel... that's why if the mars fuel generator dont work we will never.... NEVER... send men to mars...

  • What if it crashed and sent up a big blue dust cloud of death? Windows, the first OS to crash on another planet.

  • No dust plume = good (Score:3)

    by Knara ( 9377 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @03:04PM (#1772064)
    If you read the CNN article they have a comment from a JPL/NASA scientist who said that the lack of a dust plume is a good thing, because it means they didn't hit the crater wall. They wanted to hit on the bottom of the crater so they could get deep enough into the surface to expose/explode the water into space
  • why not make space stations that could convert wather into beer? that would solve world problems..
  • It's not like they dropped a Genesis Device on it.. the 'contamination' won't ever spread past that particular crater unless the following characteristics of the Moon change: no atmosphere, no wind, no erosion, no running fluids of any kind (not that close to the surface anyway). There's just nothing to pollute. Nothing to endanger. Nothing to make extinct. No Moon Owls to displace with mining equipment. Never mind the fact that the percentage of the Moon touched by humans to-date is minuscule. There's plenty to learn from the other 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999 percent of it. We can certainly do both at the same time.

    And I would think that the 'Save the Earth' project should be large enough for you without also taking on the responsibilities of landlording for the Moon.. keep your own focus and let everyone else do the same.

    I can't wait till we make it to some of the other planets and moons and find all sorts of resources there.. how many people will complain that we're 'ruining our solar system', and that 'it's a fragile balance' or something equally ridiculous?

    Imagine the slogans we'll see: Save the Europans! Attend MarsAid! Take Only Samples, Leave Only Ionized Gas!

    Wonder how Greenpeace will manage to get a finger in the pie... mebbe we'll see them running shuttles back and forth in front of water tankers, or spiking asteroids..
  • According to the article I read, just because there wasn't a dust plume found, doesn't mean that there's no water:

    David Morse, a spokesman for the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Ca., which is monitoring the global effort to search for water vapor, called the absence of a visible debris cloud upon impact ``a good sign.''

    ``Had we hit the lip of the crater or the surface of the moon, then you would expect the debris cloud to be very visible,'' Morse told CNN in a televised interview.

    Full article here. [yahoo.com]

    -Richard.
  • Read his post again. He's not suggesting that hydrogen burns in anything but the usual way. He's merely pointing out that you can't split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then combine them again and expect to make an energy profit.
    --
  • actually that last flash was me in a scape pod once i figured out it was gonna hit my summer home. damn, i had just remodeled it too... :)

  • Lunar-Mars Life Support Test Project (Score:3)

    by reed ( 19777 ) on Sunday August 01, 1999 @04:59AM (#1772074) Homepage

    i remember reading an article in wired [wlired.com] about a year ago abour the Lunar-Mars Life Support Test Project.

    from the LMLSTP Phase III home page [nasa.gov]:

    The Phase III 90-Day Human Test ended on December 19, 1997. The crew completed 91 days in the chamber, setting the record for the longest duration human closed chamber test in the United States. The Advanced Life Support System (ALSS) concept is that a human life support system, supplying food, water, and oxygen can operate indefinitely in space without resupply from Earth. This system is open with respect to energy but closed with respect to mass. This means regenerative or recycling technologies must be used.
    As part of the overall technology development effort, a series of tests have been scheduled called the Lunar-Mars Life Support Test Project (LMLSTP), formerly known as the Early Human Testing Initiative (EHTI). The first test, EHTI Phase I, was performed in August, 1995, in the 10 foot chamber, known as the Variable Pressure Growth Chamber, located in building 7B at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). The second test, LMLSTP Phase II, was performed in June, 1996, in a 20 foot chamber, known as the Life Support Systems Integration Facility, located in building 7 at JSC.
    The LMLSTP Phase IIA, begun on January 13, 1997, was the third human test to validate regenerative life support technologies. This test used hardware representative of International Space Station, scheduled for first launch in 1998.

    wired article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.06/mars.html

    LMLSTP index page: http://pet.jsc.nasa.gov/lmlstp.html

    rh

  • Since the Prospector was going to crash in the moon ANYWAY, I'd say it was money well spent - exactly $0. Get your fact straight before posting you ignorant ludite. I'd rather spend $1 million on space than $1 on bailing out failed savings and loans (remember that a coupla years ago). For News for Nerds, a lot of ani-technological right wing pin-heads seem to post here.

  • Put your toilet and shower in a centrifuge and spin it up. Voila! Instant gravity.
  • There have been three amateur plume reports. Two were would-have-missed-it-if-I-blinked and the third was the following ( enhanced Lunar Prospector plume [comcen.com.au]):
    hello all of you. I have a homemade 6" refractor, and 50 mi east of LA out here in the mountains is where i travelled last night to watch the moon show. I brought along my WATEC WAT-902H CCD camera and I must of took over 200 exposures into my laptop during the 2 minute interval. i've been painstakingly going thru the images and i think i may have found a winner. please look at it and tell me what you think. I do not have any fancy enhancment software so if anyone out there can enhance this please let me know via email. thanks, John M. image url: http://24.5.74.115/astro/scans/imag0134.jpg
  • If there was water, they wouldn't have to ship it all that way, and a base would be feasible much more rapidly. Especially since that water could be broken down into H and O and used for fuel, which was the main hope for this deposit as I understand it. If you have fuel, you're in good shape. You can always bring your own drinking water, or even just bring the H. Run it past some superheated oxygen-bearing rock, and you have water. But that's not efficient enough for a fuel source.
  • I can't decide if you meant "weather" or "water" into beer, but both sound like an interesting goal...

  • As long as the Artemis project continues to focus on the shuttle ...
    Where did you get this? I have never seen anything from ASI that said that they were "focussed" on the shuttle. In fact, Gregory Bennett recently said, "We could use lots of different launchers for the reference mission spacecraft. ... In fact, some bits might go up on Sealaunch, others on an Arianne, and some (including the crew) might go up on Gary Hudson's Propeller Beanie. :)" (Meaning, I assume, the Roton rotary rocket.)

    I'm not saying you're wrong, but where did you get this information? It appears to be outdated and should be changed.

    And I agree that relying on the shuttle probably won't prove effective over the long term. I think most of the Artemis people realize that.

  • as long as in doing this they did not accidentally break the monolith...

  • Re:Last burn too hot (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @03:08PM (#1772087) Journal
    The last altitude-raising burn was hot. The actual last burn took place behind the moon just before impact. This last burn on the last orbit changed the orbit to a collision course, and this last burn was adjusted to compensate for the previous burn.
    Remember, this is rocket science performed by rocket scientists...
  • Kefir: U have the Answer to everyting!
    GO HANSA!!!
    I think that NASA should send up, the HANSA spacestation I soon
  • Yes, the US can be improved if money is invested correctly. But the government rarely does so, as generally it just sucks up money and scatters it around without creating wealth. As the stock markets have been demonstrating, businesses have been doing a good job recently of creating wealth. [If wealth can not be created, all of your great-grandfather's descendants would be living in his log cabin.]
  • The article clearly says that it's too early to come to any conclusions. So why does the summary immediately come to the conclusion that no moon base is possible?

    Come on guys, that's just sloppy.
  • Scurrilous Knave write:
    Don't give up on that moonbase just yet, Hemos. Check out the info on the Artemis Project [asi.org] web site. They intend to establish a permanent moonbase within the next several years, and start commercial tourist flights soon thereafter.
    And they are but one of several commercial efforts to go to the moon. I happen to like the Artemis Society's approach. (It all started when somebody noticed that the commercials sold during the televised coverage of the Apollo-11 mission would have paid for the entire Apollo program.)

    HOWEVER a commercial space venture that talks about making large profits probably shouldn't have a .org domain. It scares away investors. However, if I had a spare billion dollars, I know what I would buy.

  • For crying out loud, it's gonna take teams of researchers months to completely analyze the data... Don't jump to any conclusions yet
  • The lunar regolith (trans: moondust) contains hydrogen and all you have to do to extract it is warm it up. No electolysis or working in treacherous terrain at temperatures which make steel as brittle as glass.

    As most plans for extracting metals from the moon warm the moondust up, hydrogen is going to be a by-product of lunar industry. Oxygen is also going to be produced as a by-product in huge volumes because most of the ores are oxides - ie. loaded with oxygen. As habitats are built they will generate their own oxygen and water when their metal components are beign smelted!

    But why waste it as rocket fuel? There are plenty of minerals on the moon that burn: sodium, aluminium, phosphorous and with a bit of ingenuety these can make quite rocket fuel for use under the lunar 1/6g. Aluminum-burning rockets have already been developed.

    Once you're in space, electrostatic or solar thermal engines running off lunar oxygen or simple moondust will provide enough thrust for cargo transfer to and from the moon.

    Have a look at Project Artemis on http://www.asi.org [asi.org] for details.

    Vik :v) [Can't login as a non-anonymous coward for some reason - vik@asi.org]

  • A portion of Roddenberry's cremains (cremated remains) were first carried into orbit on a shuttle mission (forget which one) as part of the personal belongings of one of the crew. This was not revealed until well after the mission, by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.

    Later, a small sample of his cremains, along with those of a few dozen other people, were flown into orbit by Celestis [celestis.com], a private company. Timothy Leary was among the others on that "Founder's Flight", leading to unending headlines of the form "Leary's Final Trip." :-).

  • According to Sci-Fi, weren't we supposed to have at least two moon bases by now?

    Moonbase Alpha Cybrary [cybrary1999.com]


    And where is my robot maid?

  • Water is without a doubt essential for a moon base, the reason why is that water (H2O) is made up of Hydrogen and Oxygen and it can be broken down into those elements.

    If you are going to make a self sufficient (well as much so as possible) moon base you required a source of oxygen and also fuel. There isn't a better source the Water. Oxygen for mmmmm air and Hydrogen for Fuel. Once you have these two things you can do almost anything, grow plants whatever.

    NOTE: Someone may have already said this but I can't be bothered reading all of the posts on this one.
  • Goddamn, you've got me scared now.

    Will tinfoil helmets stop this invasion?
  • Even though the mission /may/ not have been a failure, surely the problem is that the media expected a plume, so they will report a failure, so the US public thinks it was a failure.

    So NASA doesn't get its budget reinstated?

    It sounds like the prefect excuse, to me
  • Yeah and Sagan buried on Mars.
    Well I highly respect all these people and I think that they deserve somehow such honour.

    But on the other side it looks quite creepy and dumb. It seems that the only way humans are getting to Space is in coffins. And planets are being used like the wall of the Kremlin in Red Square. Maybe we are starting to make "elite" graveyards out of special places, founding a necromaniac vision of our future.
  • Many people at NASA was pretty clear on this. If you run on the material about this experiment you will note that the "unknowns" were quite big:

    A: probe cameras had a a very rude resolution to make a good shot over the crater.

    B: The topology of the impact zone is almost unknown. Note the it is placed in the shadow region of the crater. You can only "infere" how it would look like by considering the general morphology of such craters.

    C: We may suspect about the existence of water in some places. However we don't really know if it is exactly there in that crater.

    D: Besides we don't really know how water, if it is there, is laying in the Moon. NASA considers a very specific theory for its existence. It considers comet impacts+permanently shadowed zones+some providence that water didn't return to Cosmos. However the data of the spectrometer suggests that not only the poles possess water. A miserable, but significative, signal of it is shown on the equator. So all this could be wrong. Either because the theory on how water exists is absolutely wrong or because the spectrometer is showing something else.
  • well it also means that because the crash site didnt generate streams of molten mozzarella this simply means THIS part of the moon is not made of cheese but does not preclude other areas of being so.

    IMO the whole moon/water fiasco is a populist stunt to maintain NASAs funding.
  • We need to get people off welfare
    Therefore
    We need to get the jobs
    Problem
    The old jobs are disappearing as we now farm out our slave labour
    Solution
    We need new jobs that provide better quality working conditions and improve the standard of the enviroment.
    Problem
    How do we create new jobs
    Solution
    We need new technologies to enable us to change the way we currently work to create more jobs
    Solution
    We need to invest in technology.

    Investing in things that appear unreleated is one of the reasons the US has done so well while the UK just plain sucks. The number of great inventions from people out of the Uk has been huge but no-one invested in them as there was no direct gain. The US went off and invested in the dream and became the world power. Putting a man on the moon gave us smaller computers, the space shuttle gave us better non-stick pans. Change doesn't happen when you do the same old things.
  • Its time for NASA to start the first interplanetary pub! Its about time...wthen they find whater on the moon.,they only need to get the beer up there.....cheers!!!
  • Nasa is saying this [cnn.com] - Yes the chances are slim, but they will monitor it for a week because they sent it into the wrong place... not like you can really calculate something like a crash landing anywho.
  • is that the biodome? besides the piece of fantastic cinema that shared its namesake and plan, wasn't biodome considered a fraud becuase they kept restocking the "astronauts" with food, water and stuff?

    kylie was nice in biodome.

  • Water really convenient. (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Saturday July 31, 1999 @03:45PM (#1772109) Journal
    Water is not essential, but it would be very convenient. It is easy to purify or separate and has many uses either as water or as hydrogen and oxygen. Having water there would be much easier than transporting or making more.

    The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil [tu-muenchen.de].

    There is 10 billion tons of hydrogen [wisc.edu] in the surface rocks due to volatiles in the solar wind, which is 96 percent hydrogen. [wisc.edu] I don't know if we could collect H directly from solar wind.

  • Yeah, well maybe the US could have followed that philosophy during the Cold War. Hell, I'd rather have them shoot pure gold and dollar bills into space and watch them scatter instead of building even one more nuclear warhead.

    I certainly agree that priorities are, well, a priority, but I can't see the US making a smart decision with their money. And all the investment in the world doesn't guarantee return.

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