I’ll have to dig up the link, but recently NASA announced plans to crash a spacecraft into the lunar surface to send a tremendous amount of lunar soil upward so that another craft can collect samples looking for water on the moon. The idea is supposedly the brainchild of GW Bush who announced plans to colonize the moon. (Of course, GW has nothing to lose by announcing such grandiose plans with hopes of fathering-in a whole new era.)
But…wouldn’t NASA have thought to look for water in all those previous trips to the moon? - Jinx
You are such an idiot, I don’t even know where to begin.
Why don’t you go dig up that cite and support some of the idiotic claims you’re making. The search for water on Mars long predates Bush and will probably continue after he’s out of office. The water is thought to be under the surface, which is why they want to “crash” the probe into the soil. If you had half the IQ that Bush has, you’d know that. Start educating yourself here.
You are going to regret openning this thread, as it is going to turn against you faster than you can say “Jinx”.
The search for water on the moon wasn’t GWB’s idea by a long shot, it’s been suspected for well before he came to office. There’s pretty strong evidence that water ice exists near the poles of the Moon, pretty far away from any of the Apollo landing sites.
A similar mission to the upcoming one was tried in 1999, but the impactor wasn’t big enough and didn’t hit at the optimum angle, and so no water was detected. (That wasn’t a mistake on NASA’s part --the final part of Lunar Prospector’s mission wasn’t even conceived until it’s life was nearly over anyway. It was a long shot that it was going to work in the first place.)
(On preview, John Mace beat me to it, but not particularly politely, so I’ll post as is.)
Sorry, Mace. I didn’t know those were some of your very own footprints up there… BTW, Yes I do know the project will outlive Bush’s term. Actually, i thought the water was on the surface in lunar seas… :rolleyes:
Yeah, he’ll probably get nailed for this, but my reaction was similar to his. (Not identical. Similar, as in, I thought that this question left something to be desired as a GQ post.)
Well, you did inject some politics into your OP, so it’s not too surprising that I thought this was in the Pit. The water is thought to be a lot deeper than anyone has probed before.
This isn’t the “brainchild” of Bush, it’s a NASA project. And you don’t have to want to colonize the moon to be interested in water. It would be necessary for a long term moon base for scientific purposes: you need water to drink, and you can use it generate Hydrogen for use as fuel.
John, I apologize, too. I didn’t mean for my post to be inflammatory. What I had read was that this crash would only scratch the surface to throw dust upwards. It does not sound like it is suppose to bore beneath the surface. But, that could be one journalist’s take on the matter. If the former is correct, I was only asking hadn’t NASA already thought to do this early-on?
Afterall…asking stupid questions keeps this Board profitable (as evidenced by the growth in the advertising)! - Jinx
The original idea to crash a satellite into the moon was the brainchild of my brother’s graduate advisor at the University of Texas and was the main focus of my brother’s (ufortunately uncompleted) doctoral thesis. Here’s a short article about the event. The crash took a ton of work to coordinate and my brother got to see it out at McDonald Observatory; it’s too bad it didn’t yield more results. Hopefully this one will.
Jinx does have a valid question though. Why is Bush so hot on a lunar base in order to ramp up for a manned mission to Mars? If you’re doing a major mission to Mars, going to and then leaving the moon is a major economic waste. It makes no sense.
People who study what’s been going on in Washington in recent years deduce the following:
Most of NASA’s current projects don’t put money in the pockets of The Right People.
Ergo, those projects have to be cancelled and new projects started, with the contracts for the new projects routed to The Right People.
The lunar base is the goal. (Well, the pretend goal.) No one expects a manned Mars mission project to continue to receive funding once there is a new administration. But the funding for the preliminaries for the Moon base will have already been locked in.
It’s the Enron style of business. See that pile of money over there? Let’s get our hands on it.
Remember what Deep Throat said: “Follow the money.”
PS: In case anybody cares, notice that Jinx’s OP referred to water on the Moon and not on Mars. It seems that one person failed to notice this.
Actually, no one did. What you failed to notice, however, in your eagerness to play “Gotcha!” was that it was but a mere typo, and the rest of that post, and that poster’s subsequent posts made it clear that the poster knew what was meant and simply mistyped.
First of all, the notion that “NASA’s current projects don’t put money in the pockets of The Right People” is absurd. In fact, under the CEV program, the money is going to continue to go to most of the same people who currently run the Shuttle program; ATK (which makes the Shuttle SRBs and will make the CEV booster stack and heavy lift vehicle) and Boeing (which is half of the United Space Alliance, the company that runs the Shuttle operations and is half of the Boeing-Northrop Grumman team that is proposing on CEV) or Lockheed (the other half of USA). The biggest change is that either Lockheed wins the contract for CEV (unlikely) and Boeing loses a bit of business, or the Boeing-Northrop Grumman team wins (likely) and Lockheed squeals like a pig until someone inevitably stuffs a chunk of fat in their mouths. The STS program was carefully designed–and I mean that in a political rather than technical sense–to provide jobs for people in virtually every state; CEV will be the same if not moreso.
It’s largely true that a manned Lunar base as a preparatory step for a Mars mission is a waste–arguments that it allows us to develop necessary technology or whatever aside–because its clear that CEV isn’t going to offer anything like the capability for manned interplanetary travel. There is, in the current proposal requirements, nothing that indicates any need for extended duration (multi-month) missions, nor will the system that will satisfy proposal requirements be adequate as a basis to scale up from. Whatever kind of vessel will be (in hopeful eventuality) used for manned interplanetary exploration, it will be fundamentally different from anything developed for the CEV contract.
So what is the reason for a cislunar mission, plans for a lunar base, et cetera? Quite simply, this all came about after the Chinese announced their plans for space exploration, and then made credible efforts in that direction. Although their schedule is overly ambitious, it is entirely likely that they’ll launch their proposed space platform and will attempt a lunar mission, and the US doesn’t want to be shamed into admitting that they can’t do the same. To this end, we’ve undercut decades-long unmanned missions (mostly helmed out of JPL) in favor of an ill-advised crash effort to repeat Apollo.
As for Mars, that’s just grandiose jabber. Reagan mouthed the same words, and with just as little lack of resolve on following through. By the time humans land on Mars (if ever) they’ll be using something other than chemical rockets for propulsion and will have developed adequate technologies for indefinite survival in space rather than flying in a cramped cannister. And there are good odds that they won’t be carrying an American flag. But the serious goal in interstellar expansion shouldn’t be to Mars, but rather to a near Earth asteroid, which could be exploited for its mineral resources.
As for the OP’s question, the Apollo lunar missions landed in a vary narrow range of near equatorial sites and explored only a few square kilometers in the most superficial manner. We have very little idea what most of the exposed surface of the Moon is like, much less what lies a few meters under the lunar regolith. Aside from the exploitation potential, this provides a much better understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary bodies and is useful in that regard. It certainly isn’t “the brainchild of GW Bush,” who wouldn’t know a basic science text if it were written in single syllable letters, and you’d be well advised to perform the minimal amount of research (i.e. Google something like “moon mission impact water”) which would have offered all of the salient details of the topic at hand.
Why are you setting the main justification for establishing a lunar base aside? How are we going to develop the techonology to build habitats and life support systems that can operate unsupplied for years at a time if we don’t use the moon as a laboratory?
The moon and Mars are very different environments. One is vacuum and the other is not, for a start. The moon has a much longer rotational period, and it doesn’t have any airborne dust. Very different temperatures too. If you want to test modules for a Mars base, it’s much better to do it in a laboratory than on the moon.
According to my Astro teacher last semester, Stranger and scr4 have it pretty much right.
The Moon was the last big success in the manned programs. Due to this, it’s kind or our touchstone. Any plans beyond orbit seem to include a stop at the moon.
The Russians are the same way with Phobos, for some reason. Their plans for Mars always include a stop at Phobos.
Because we’ll be spending tens of billions of dollars just to get to this “laboratory” that would be better spent in developing the necessary life support and propulsion technologies necessary to maintain long-term extraterrestrial habitation. As has already been pointed out, Mars is a very different environment than the Moon. Nor is it really plausible to claim that the Moon is a good lab because we can easily rescue colonists from the Moon should some catastrophe occur.
If we want to establish a colony on the Moon we should do so because there is some value in doing that. If that value is to be the top dog in manned space exploration rather than cede to the Chinese, then so be it. From a fiscal and scientific viewpoint it makes little sense, but one can say that about much of the manned space program.
If we want to establish a self-sustaining outpost on Mars–for reasons I can’t really can’t fathom–then the goal should be to progressively improve the technology of interplanetary propulsion and long-term space habitation. We’re not going to colonize Mars in little cans propelled chemical boosters travelling into low-energy Hohman orbits.
But Mars is just a red herring. There are no serious plans to go to Mars in the works.
