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Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

apod.nasa.gov

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Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#41

Post by waterlesscloud »

simonh wrote: post #25
winestock wrote: post #3

Quote:"Now thirty five years later, Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk on the Moon." That page was last updated in December of 2007, so add another four years. How many people in this forum can truthfully say this sentence: "Man has not walked on the moon in my lifetime." Say it again. Say it again. Say it again until righteous rage makes you want to spit on all of the bureaucrats, activists, and other par…

Absolutely, what we need to solve all humanity's problems is more moon rock. If only we had enough moon rocks, things would be just so much better. Why can't the paper pushers and beureaucrats just get with the program and give us our moon rocks? How much moon rock do you think we need? A dozen tons? A hundred tons? Wow, imagine what we could achieve with a hundred tons of moon rock. Why, the sky's the limit! Which p…

We should return to the moon because people want to go.

Is any additional reason really needed?

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#42

Post by buyx »

zerohp wrote: post #21
ricardobeat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many features in moon photographs are bizarre, I don't blame the nuts too much... In this crop from a panorama, for example, the rover seems completely out of proportion, like a miniature: http://cl.ly/3M0v0S3R2M2N3h180Q1W Compare the size of the footprint and the stones in the left side, to the stones near the rover. Either the moon has some weird rock distributions, the image is highly deformed, or this is a fake :…

That photo is obviously a composite of multiple shots. You see strange deformations like that all the time in composite shots. If we apply Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is that they went to the moon. Over 350,000 people were involved at a total cost of $140 billion of todays dollars. I've never heard anyone deny that we had the capability to land on the moon. The rockets, vehicles and astronauts were all re…

Agreed. People seem to overestimate the power of the government to fake things. If it was that easy to pull off a hoax of that magnitude, it is quite likely that WMDs would have been "found" in Iraq after the invasion.

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#43

Post by cema »

simonh wrote: post #38
arethuza wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was to get to the Moon before the Soviets?

Can it be a coincidence that the moon rock-poor USSR collapsed while the moon rock-rich USA is now the world's only real superpower? OK, so maybe I'm pushing this a bit...

USSR was not moon rock-poor, it had a reasonable amount of moon rock extracted by automatic space craft (more precisely, space craft not inhabited by humans). The point of reaching the Moon is different, it's to spark the imagination and inspire. And one of the reasons the USSR collapsed is, btw, the ideas it was based on were not inspiring any longer (an understatement!)

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#44

Post by ericd »

simonh wrote: post #38
arethuza wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was to get to the Moon before the Soviets?

Can it be a coincidence that the moon rock-poor USSR collapsed while the moon rock-rich USA is now the world's only real superpower? OK, so maybe I'm pushing this a bit...

The original point was competing with the Soviets and generating national pride, sure. The point now would be to get practice with the harder problems of survival in space, as a trial run for the marathon that is going to Mars. Every time we as a nation do something that seems audacious, we raise the morale of the nation and energize the populace to work harder on pretty much everything else. We could certainly use a shot of national pride to the arm after the events of the past decade...

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#45

Post by simonh »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #41
simonh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, what we need to solve all humanity's problems is more moon rock. If only we had enough moon rocks, things would be just so much better. Why can't the paper pushers and beureaucrats just get with the program and give us our moon rocks? How much moon rock do you think we need? A dozen tons? A hundred tons? Wow, imagine what we could achieve with a hundred tons of moon rock. Why, the sky's the limit! Which p…

We should return to the moon because people want to go. Is any additional reason really needed?

Actually you're right. That's a perfectly good and reasonable point. If people want to go to the moon, they should be at liberty to do so. If you want to help them, perhaps you could donate money to the cause. Heck, let's make it tax deductible.

Just checking though - you're not suggesting using any of my money, or other taxpayer's money to send them, right? Because if so, we're back to needing one of those good old fashioned actual reasons again.

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#46

Post by simonh »

cema wrote: post #43
simonh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can it be a coincidence that the moon rock-poor USSR collapsed while the moon rock-rich USA is now the world's only real superpower? OK, so maybe I'm pushing this a bit...

USSR was not moon rock-poor, it had a reasonable amount of moon rock extracted by automatic space craft (more precisely, space craft not inhabited by humans). The point of reaching the Moon is different, it's to spark the imagination and inspire. And one of the reasons the USSR collapsed is, btw, the ideas it was based on were not inspiring any longer (an understatement!)

USA: 382 kg USSR: 0.32 kg Recovered from meteorites: 48 kg

But that's from Wikipedia, so you can add a few grains of salt to those figures.

One of the main reasons the moon missions were cut short is because the public lost interest, just as they did with the Space Shuttle. The inspiration argument only gets you so far, and we've been that far already.

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#47

Post by dredmorbius »

ricardobeat wrote: post #36
dredmorbius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few factors contribute to that photo's impression. Aside from being a composite: - There's no atmosphere on the moon. Which means there's no distance haze. Far objects are just as sharp as near ones. - There are no reference points to indicate scale. This is fairly common in terrestrial photos of barren landscapes, especially Alpine, Arctic, or glacial photos. In this image of a Pakistani landslide, note the appare…

Agreed, but the rocks should serve as a good enough reference. The effect on that moon shot would require rock sizes to increase almost linearly with distance - rocks are a foot wide near the camera but half-meter wide afar - which is extremely odd. (of course I believe that to be an artifact of image stitching and perspective corrections, what I meant is that it's easy to misinterpret these oddities)

Rock sizes follow a regular distribution of some sort, most likely a power function / Poisson distribution. So, nearby, you'll have a lot of smaller rocks, further away you'll have a reasonable number of larger ones. For moderate-field views (such as the image shown) this may not show much difference.

Other factors of the moon: there's no weathering action, absent meteor impacts and very slow microparticle weathering, but this is taking place over hundreds of millions to billions of years. Where rocks of different sizes on earth will weather quickly (tens to millions of years depending on rain, freeze/thaw, wind, organic (lichen, bacteria) actions, etc.), this doesn't happen on the moon.

Upshot: near small rocks look very much like far large rocks.

And again, in alpine or desert landscapes without notable organic features (plants, animals) or human structures (roads, buildings), it can be very, very difficult to estimate range.

Re: Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

#48

Post by Nick_C »

rogerbinns wrote: post #16
winestock wrote: post #3

Quote:"Now thirty five years later, Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk on the Moon." That page was last updated in December of 2007, so add another four years. How many people in this forum can truthfully say this sentence: "Man has not walked on the moon in my lifetime." Say it again. Say it again. Say it again until righteous rage makes you want to spit on all of the bureaucrats, activists, and other par…

I can recommend some books about the era that are very good reading. http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Man-Moon-Astronaut/dp/0312199... written by Eugene Cernan (the last man on the moon) http://www.amazon.com/Flight-My-Life-Mission-Control/dp/0452... written by and about mission control http://www.amazon.com/First-Man-Life-Neil-Armstrong/dp/B001O... about Armstrong but representative of many astronauts (and the only bo…

Nice list. I add "Failure Is Not An Option" by Gene Kranz, flight director on both Apollo 11 and 13 and also in flight control from way back to the Mercury program.

It's a nice history of manned space flight from the controllers' perspective. Very interesting, especially from a general engineering point of view.

http://www.amazon.com/Failure-Is-Not-Option-Mission/dp/07838...

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