News Article Thread

[publius]

Sometimes people e-mail me news articles, press releases, & such things that they think might be of interest, either as links or as copied text.

This thread is for that sort of item. Feel free to post, but give attribution for copied text. Warning : hyperlinks to news articles can rapidly become obsolete.

[publius]

30 January 2006 (NASA)

"The Smell of Moondust" -- a NASA article referring to certain odd properties of lunar dust, reported by the Apollo astronauts, which are not preserved in the returned samples because they have been exposed to air. It almost goes without saying that rock & dust samples for academic research (& private collectors) will be among our early exports, beyond the geological & chemical work we will be doing for our own purposes.


04 April 2008

Giant spider robots -- conceived by someone at NASA to carry around a portable lunar "base". Intriguing as a mode of transportation, I can hardly help thinking that the single self-contained unit with no room for expansion is just the sort of thing NASA tends to do, and we need to get away from.


17 April 2008

ESA team grows plants in simulated lunar soil, using bacteria to release the nutrients in the minerals. This is a good idea, and the ESA official who called it "science fiction" deserves a swift kick in the seat of the pants. If the European Space Agency thinks that space development is laughable, who is going to take it seriously?

[publius]

21 April 2008

Lunar-geomagnetic interactions may have some intriguing effects. This is not precisely news, & there has been speculation for years on "terminator dustclouds". Do note that the most strongly affected areas are those on the night-side while Luna sweeps through the geomagnetic tail, in other words, Farside.

[publius]

Giant lunar telescopes can, apparently, be made with a sort of concrete composed of regolith dust, carbon nanotubes, & epoxy. According to one Peter Chen, this provides "a strong rationale for doing astronomy from the moon".

[publius]

This is very nice.

According to new research, hydrogen was present in the lunar interior after the formation of the crust, because it turns up as water in the beads of glass spit out from volcanoes, which are found in the rocks brought back by Apollo. This comes as a surprise to planetary scientists, who have assumed that the hydrogen, carbon, & other elements which form volatile compounds were lost, either vaporized in the initial impact which generated the debris which coalesced to form Luna, or boiled off when the planetary mass melted to form the ancient crust. This provides an additional line of evidence to confirm the controversial Kozyreff spectrogram, an observation from the 1950s of (apparently) hydrocarbon gas vapour being expelled from the lunar surface in the crater Alphonsus.

This gives us much more confidence of finding methane or similar in the natural gas under Plato (helium & argon are pretty much a given).

[kindhost]

There are 3 major disadvantages to space stations: gravity, temperature regulation, and atmospheric pressure. These problems don't exist on Venus City. If we are going to talk about a significant population of humans living off the Earth (I'm talking thousands) I would bet on cloud cities on Venus before space stations. A hull breach on a space station would be a much more significant problem than on the floating city. However, Venus city has 3 major problems: distance from Earth, gravity well, and raw materials. What is needed prior to building Venus City is a space based infrastructure. This would include large space stations, perhaps built along the Stanford Torus model. I don't see those supporting more than a few hundred humans each, though. There could be orbiting space stations around Venus and Skyhooks for transfering raw materials. As far as building materials go, the atmosphere has plenty of carbon so your basic building blocks could be carbon nanotubes (I'm not sure how they hold up against sulfuric acid though). There is no shortage of solar energy at 50k up, you would get almost as much solar power from the clouds below you reflecting sunlight up as you would from above you. You would still need to import oxygen, hydrogen, and a few other important elements. Mercury could be mined and materials sent to Venus. The only alternative to large scale human colonization of space that would allow for Earth gravity and life style would be Oneillian Space stations (think Babylon 5) which I think would be a step up in difficulty.

People ask why should we go into space and try to colonize it. There are 2 good answers: energy and economies of scale. Energy is abundant and cheap in space (in the inner solar system). Once you are established outside of the Earth's gravity well, transportation is really cheap per kilometer traveled. If an economy of scale is built in space, the material needs of humanity would be taken care of in a way that could sustain billions of humans without polluting the Earth. The wealth generated in space could be rained down on the people of the Earth.


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[kindhost]

http://www.nasa.gov/mov/260503main_red_green_blue2.mov



Trey Brister
http://www.KindHOST.com

[aaronaskew]

Lunar spacecraft compete for $2 million NASA prize

"Nine rocket-powered vehicles will compete for NASA's $2 million, 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Oct. 24-25."

[publius]

Updates from the period the Forum was down

Is NASA's ARES doomed? -- report from the Orlando Sentinel on the ongoing problems of the launch component of the Constellation program (specifically, Ares I, otherwise known as the Crew Launch Vehicle, which has been marginal in capacity & safety all along)

Armadillo Aerospace has won the "level 1" prize of the NASA Centennial Challenge which simulates lunar landing

The Japanese Kaguya/SELENE lunar orbiter has not found surface ice near the South pole, although the significance of this is unclear (see also here)

SpaceX successfully makes orbit with their privately-developed Falcon 1 booster

India has launched Chandrayaan-1, a lunar orbital mapping probe intended to provide high-resolution global topographical data. EDIT : The probe has now entered lunar orbit, following a rather complex series of transfer maneuvers.

Asteroid hits Earth -- a 5m diameter carbonaceous chondrite, which exploded in the upper atmosphere (bolide) with the equivalent explosive power of a small nuclear bomb (2 kt). This happens every so often, but this time it was predicted in advance, & photographed by a weather satellite

China launched third manned space mission, performed spacewalk using Chinese-made spacesuit (w. additional crewman in Russian suit as backup)

[publius]

Data tapes from an Apollo instrument designed to characterize lunar dust have been found, but there's some trouble deciphering them. One wonders if this could be read as a hopeful sign for finding Apollo 11 TV downlink tapes.

On a similar theme, after considerable effort was spent in restoring Lunar Orbiter images from photographic sources, reconstructions are now being made from the data tapes originally used to make the photographs. This is, of course, still second-generation, since the original photographs were made on 70mm film which was destroyed when the Orbiters impacted, but it is better.

[publius]

An article suggesting that the combined effects of microgravity & radiation may be "show-stoppers" for lunar settlement — I posted a reply to the effect that I don't consider the scenario contemplated very realistic. The accompanying NASA presentation suggests that (amazing!) long-term lunar habitats may have to be shielded! Considering that you've got the mass of a small planet to play with, this shouldn't be a problem…

[publius]

Research shows the presence of molecular water & hydroxyl radicals on the lunar surface — we might almost call it dew! There seems to be something resembling an active hydrological cycle, though a very alien one. The researchers spent months trying to massage it out of their data, because they assumed Luna must be absolutely dry, only to find confirming data from earlier space probes which had been ignored for the very same reason!

[publius]

Buzz Aldrin has proposed "A Different Kind of Moon Race", in the form of an international (& not just intergovernmental, either) consortium for lunar development

Alan Stern, principal investigator of the NASA New Horizons Pluto probe, says that where possible, humans (not robots) should be used for planetary exploration

Johnson Space Center is conducting tests in Antarctica on an inflatable prototype for an early lunar shelter

[publius]

The investigators of the Japanese Kaguya probe have announced the discovery of a large, intact lava tube in the Marius Hills region of the Near Side. This is perhaps more important for the confirmation that such tubes exist than for the specific case, since the region doesn't yet seem to have much to recommend it, & a lava tube with a shallow crust over it might cause more problems than it solves, eg by generating secondary cosmic rays.