Posts Tagged ‘moon’
GRAIL Mission Is On Its Way to the Moon
Read our full coverage of the mission .
After Weather Delay, Grail Moon Mission Now Set to Launch Saturday
Strong winds in the upper atmosphere forced NASA to scrub Thursday's planned launch of its . The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory is now set to lift off at 8:33 a.m. EDT or 9:12 a.m. PDT Saturday — but the weather is still not cooperating.
There's about a of favorable conditions for Saturday, the same initial forecast for Thursday, the space agency said. Upper level winds were in violation of the launch criteria and must calm down before NASA will send a rocket through them.
Grail is designed to study the gravity field and interior composition of the moon. Twin probes will fly in formation, monitoring tiny changes in the distance between then to discern the moon's gravitational field.
They will take several months to arrive at the moon, ensuring they burn as much fuel as possible before arrival.
NASA Heads Back to the Moon, to Uncover Its Origins and to Inspire A New Generation
The GRAIL mission launches this week
GRAIL A and its twin GRAIL B are set to launch Thursday morning aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launch window opens at 8:37 a.m. EDT, although weather looks pretty iffy for the next couple days, according to NASA. Once they arrive at the moon, the two washing machine-sized probes will fly in formation, with instruments sensitive enough to detect a hair’s breadth separation. Along with those gravity-mapping instruments, GRAIL will carry something called MoonKAM — “Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students.”
Logging in from schools around the country, students will be able to virtually coast a few miles above the surface of the moon, scanning the pallid dirt for craters or perhaps an open plain that might someday make a . Students can select target areas by studying topographic maps on the , and send them to NASA’s MoonKAM operations center. The images will be fairly high-resolution, but they won’t approach the abilities of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which took the snapshots we saw this week of . But that’s not the point, said Maria Zuber, a professor of geophysics at MIT and the mission’s lead investigator.
“If a student takes an image of the surface, it’s really a transformative experience. You can bet that a smart kid will take the time to sit down and figure out how to use this software,” she said in an interview.
Each spacecraft will carry a digital camera setup with four camera heads, one pointed ahead, two pointed below and one pointed behind the spacecraft’s trajectory. They can capture video and still images up to 30 fps, and downlink them to the project’s control center at the University of California-San Diego. The program is a partnership with Sally Ride Science, a company founded by Ride, the first American woman in space.
Zuber and the other mission scientists, many of whom have kids and grandkids, hope the moon images will inspire a new generation of lunar scientists — who will understand, as they have, that the history of the moon is crucial for understanding the history of Earth.
With its perennially unchanging mountains and craters, the moon is a good proxy for the early Earth, Zuber said. Understanding how it formed could shed some light on the geologic processes behind Earth’s formation, and that of the other terrestrial planets. Just last month, researchers from the University of California-Santa Cruz said the moon may have once had a after a collision. Grail will shed some light on this question, as well as explain whether the moon has a molten core, which will provide some more information about how it coalesced.
Zuber said Grail will solve a few pieces of the larger lunar puzzle.
“If you think about your family and friends and the people you know best, if you just see what they’re like on the outside, you don’t really know them,” she said. “If you really want to know them, you want to understand what’s inside of them, and that tells you what they’re all about.”
Grail has several unique characteristics that will help it pull this off. The spacecraft are based on a classified military satellite called XSS-11, built to demonstrate satellite rendezvous maneuvers, which helped mission planners design a system that could work well in tandem. Its avionics are modeled after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a successful mapping mission that is still sending back data. Previous gravity mapping missions, including the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment, also helped inform some of the project's goals, Zuber said.
Grail’s instruments are sensitive enough to measure changes of a few tenths of a micron every second, infinitesimally small differences that result from changing topographic features. But such small differences can also be caused by other phenomena, like solar wind and fuel sloshing around in the spacecraft’s tanks, for instance. Grail scientists had to account for that, too, so they are sending Grail A and B on a lengthy, circuitous course so they burn as much fuel as possible before entering orbit.
The probes will arrive at the moon as 2012 dawns, with one arriving Dec. 31 and one arriving Jan. 1. They will spend about two months synchronizing their orbits, and once everything is in alignment, the probes will spend three months making their gravity measurements. The whole mission will be done by next June, Zuber said. The spacecraft will crash into the lunar surface shortly thereafter — but not before sending photos back to schoolchildren.
Although the main mission is to map the moon’s gravity field, Grail will accomplish much more than that, Zuber said.
“It’s very hard to get a gravity mission funded. You definitely have to have the big picture in mind,” Zuber said. And for NASA, that can mean much more than just science.
New NASA Photos Show Footprints on the Moon
The windless moon preserves tracks in dust pretty nicely. In addition to this Apollo 12 shot (), NASA has released images of the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 landing sites.
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Japanese Domino’s Unveils Elaborate, Carefully Thought-Out Plans to Sling Pizza on the Moon
a guide to the new features of the Domino's on the moon.
So, obvious first questions first, is this actually going to get made? No, because a spokesman for Domino's estimates it'll cost about ¥1.67 trillion--about $21.74 billion--to build, with about $7.3 billion required just to get the materials out to the moon. Of course, Domino's does note that the plan calls for keeping costs down by making concrete out of "mineral deposits on the moon." (Might we suggest using Enrico Dini's ?) Another reason this won't actually get made: the moon has a permanent resident population of zero. A Domino's spokesperson says "we have not yet determined when the restaurant might open," although "never" seems like a pretty fair guess.
But the plans are pretty cool: it would be a two-story dome with a diameter of 26 meters, with a ton of storage space and places to grow pizza-making ingredients with LED lights, since they can't very well plant a garden out back and it'd get awfully expensive to rent a or rocket every time the kitchen needs a new bucket of sauce.
Theoretically, this is just a PR-friendly response to Pizza Hut's 2001 , but the Domino's spokesperson insists the company is actually just thinking ahead. "In the future," he said, "we anticipate there will be many people living on the moon, astronauts who are working there and, in the future, citizens of the moon."
[via ]
Japanese Domino’s Unveils Elaborate, Carefully Thought-Out Plans to Sling Pizza on the Moon
a guide to the new features of the Domino's on the moon.
So, obvious first questions first, is this actually going to get made? No, because a spokesman for Domino's estimates it'll cost about ¥1.67 trillion--about $21.74 billion--to build, with about $7.3 billion required just to get the materials out to the moon. Of course, Domino's does note that the plan calls for keeping costs down by making concrete out of "mineral deposits on the moon." (Might we suggest using Enrico Dini's ?) Another reason this won't actually get made: the moon has a permanent resident population of zero. A Domino's spokesperson says "we have not yet determined when the restaurant might open," although "never" seems like a pretty fair guess.
But the plans are pretty cool: it would be a two-story dome with a diameter of 26 meters, with a ton of storage space and places to grow pizza-making ingredients with LED lights, since they can't very well plant a garden out back and it'd get awfully expensive to rent a or rocket every time the kitchen needs a new bucket of sauce.
Theoretically, this is just a PR-friendly response to Pizza Hut's 2001 , but the Domino's spokesperson insists the company is actually just thinking ahead. "In the future," he said, "we anticipate there will be many people living on the moon, astronauts who are working there and, in the future, citizens of the moon."
[via ]
FYI: Can I Buy Land on the Moon?
Alan Wasser, the Space Settlement Institute’s chairman, says that a private company should build a “spaceline,” similar to an airline, between the Earth and moon. And because a corporation is not a nation, the Outer Space Treaty would not apply. Corporations have settled new worlds before. The London Company was a joint stock enterprise that established the Jamestown Settlement in 1607,providing transportation to pioneers in return for seven years of labor in America, where they cultivated tobacco and other crops for the company’s profit.
Wasser says that land ownership—and the promise of profits based on it—is a necessary incentive to invest in space settlement. He is lobbying for legislation that would commit the U.S. government to honor future moon claims. But anyone can buy a deed to land on the moon right now. The Lunar Registry (“Earth’s leading lunar real-estate agency”) sells such deeds on its website for about $20 an acre. Doyle says that some kind of lunar governing body is necessary to recognize and enforce property rights, but no such body exists. So as it stands, the claims are not much more than fancy pieces of paper.
Doyle says that future moon settlers could look to the Antarctic Treaty, which designates the continent as a scientific preserve and prohibits military activity or mining; 28 countries maintain research stations subject to review by the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs, which oversees best practices of scientific research on the continent. “Anybody who understands the implications of imposing a national law on celestial bodies,” Doyle says, “understands we are better to treat it like Antarctica and the high seas than we are to treat it like Manhattan.” If not, he says, we would “take all the problems and contests we’ve had on the surface of the Earth for 5,000 years and extend them to outer space.”
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