This is so very cool: The Lunar and Planetary Institute has set up a website all about the Moon.
From the site:
After a 35-year hiatus, NASA is going back to the Moon. The agency and its partners in academia, industry, and the international community are engaged in an exciting new exploration initiative designed to study the lunar surface robotically beginning in 2008 and with crewed landers before 2020.
To support that activity, the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) has developed a new web-based information portal for the lunar science and exploration community. This new website provides access to everything “lunar†from the earliest Apollo-era documents to the most recent lunar research reports.
Nice! But it’s not just for geeks like me. Well, OK, yeah it is:
The site is designed for a broad range of users, including exploration architects, lunar scientists, students, and the general public.
Information is organized under several specific categories: (1) Lunar Mission Summaries; (2) Apollo-Era Documents; (3) Lunar Samples; (4) Lunar Images; (5) Lunar Surface; (6) Lunar Meteorites; (7) Exploration Strategies; (8) Constellation Hardware; (9) Landing Site Studies; (10) Computational Tools; and (11) Educational Products.
Reading this site is a wonderful taste of the excitement of lunar exploration, one that I hope will get a second chance very soon.
They even have a lunar crater size calculator! Give it the size and other characteristics of the impactor, and it will tell you about the crater it will make and even give you a profile of it. The calculator is a little buggy; I told it to use an iron asteroid 1 km across and it said the crater would be 1.165 meters across. Hmmm. But it does have some cool features, and worked most of the time.
I love this (though I’ve seen it before):
That’s a map of the landing sites of all previous missions. There’s lots more. Very cool stuff. This is the sort of thing I was begging NASA to do a couple of years ago, and… well, I didn’t get very far. I think this website has a lot of potential, and will only get better as go back to the Moon. Keep it bookmarked!
October 7th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
My , that looks familiar! By the way, congratulations on your award. Nice going.
BAMom
October 7th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
How come whenever I look at moon features close up, I almost never see craters, and almost always domes?
October 7th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Domes?? Lunar craters are just about the most easy thing to see with a small telescope. Perhaps you are prone to the “hollow-face” illusion where something hollow actually looks like its protruding??
See for example:
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/fcs_hollow-face/index.html
Just a thought…
October 7th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I am glad this is happening. But still, I am worried that going to the moon first will sap resources away from Mars exploration, where the REALLY exciting science is.
I know going to the moon is supposed to help us prepare for Mars (even though the moon and Mars are about as different as celestial bodies can be) but going to the moon is only a worthwhile goal is we are interested in long term habitation. On the scale of just a few decades, going to the moon is just a waste of resources.
So I am worried that giving any attention to the moon will cause the program to become a ‘moon only’ program, at the expense of science probes, and manned missions to mars. Because lets face it, the moon has it’s uses (it’s a great place to build a telescope) but there probably isn’t any life, water, or revolutionary discoveries waiting to be made there.
October 7th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Yep, that’s it. I’m a hollow man. Thanks, Kevin… I’ll add it to the list.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:27 am
I just entered the same figures you used and it gave me a rim diameter of 18.8 km. Obviously someone has debugged the program since you checked it out.
This could be quite handy for estimating the the crater caused by an asteroid impact on earth so I plan on using it again soon.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Okay, as much as I gripe about the expense and danger of sending humans to do machines’ work, I have to admit I eat this stuff up. I have read with relish everything there is to read on Apollo, and I will continue to do so. Thanks for pointing out this fascinating site.
I imagine the 1.65 meter crater was probably left by the original computer that tried to play out the scenario of a 1 km impactor!
October 8th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Speaking of maps of the moon… if you are not aware of it yet… there are a couple of hidden gems at google.
http://moon.google.com
http://mars.google.com
October 8th, 2007 at 4:07 am
I assume you’re referring to pictures. The basic reason is that your brain has no clues about which direction the light is coming from. The 2D image is equally compatible with craters and domes, when the direction of light is reversed.
Why preferably domes? Perhaps the brain “thinks” that a mound is more likely to be encountered than a bowl. That’s just a guess.
If you concentrate, you can usually trick your brain into reversing the direction of light, so you see craters. You can also trick it back into seeing domes again.
October 8th, 2007 at 5:12 am
I saw domes with the APOD image of Iapetus found here
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070914.html
When I rotated the image 180 degrees it looks fine.
Here are the two images for comparison
http://dustyloft.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/iapetus-illusions/
October 8th, 2007 at 7:16 am
As a lunar observer from way back, I love this. Bookmark it, you say? Heck, I’m going to bookmark it several times.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Sweet! Moon program on the rise! Can it come a little sooner so I can skip school?
October 8th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Domes vs craters, Phil has posted on this. One thing that typically causes the effect is the direction of sunlight in the image vs expectation. We expect sunlight from the top of the screen. In low angle images or images across sun, the light falls weird, defying expectation. The brain fills in a guess primed by misunderstanding the lighting. That is why rotating the image can help – it shifts the sunlight direction and helps the brain recognize what it is seeing.
October 8th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Very cool site! I’ve bookmarked that and I’ll put it on my club’s astronomy stie (click my name to see the site)
Tom
October 8th, 2007 at 10:15 am
I visited the site and clicked on Lunar samples, having long desired to see what we got. I’ve never been fortunate to see with my own eyes any other samples outside of the Air and Space Museum in DC. So I randomly selected one of the samples collected on the Apollo 15 mission. “Green Glass Clods” was a 20-page report filled with data, pictures, and geological composition information. How can anyone think after looking at this site that all this is “made up?????” Who on earth would go to these lengths? The information we gathered was astounding. Thanks for the link, Phil.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Outside the Mission: Space ride at Epcot is a large (8 feet tall?) moon globe with all of the landing sites marked on it. Very cool.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
What we really need is find a way to get Behrokh Khoshnevis’s huge robotic 3D printer on the moon to start building Moonbase Alpha.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=57
Sending tons of material to the moon to build shelters would be ridiculously overpriced. The moon has a great deal of building material just lying around on the surface. We could send one of these robots up there, feed in the 3D CAD file and material in to build the shelter, and send in other robots and astronauts to put in the finishing touches.
…the Eagle Transporters I’ll leave up to Boeing!
October 8th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
[...] The Moon, up close and personal no Bad Astronomy [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 8:40 am
We’re whalers of the moon.
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain’t no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
The direction of the light in the image has never mattered for me. Rotating does nothing to change whether I see craters or domes preferentially.
Looking straight down, the concept of up and down don’t apply, so I don’t really buy that explanation. When we look straight down at the ground, we could have the sun in front of us or behind us. We use other clues to determine where it is, which aren’t available in a static photograph.