India's lunar landing made a mess on the Moon India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has published research that reveals its Chandrayaan-3 mission made quite a mess on the Moon. The mission's Vikram lander touched down on August 23 without incident, becoming India's first successful Moon mission – as well as humanity's first craft to land near the lunar south pole. …
Yeah, set the gravity level with the dial on the side?
Oh, I guess a design consideration is making sure the dial can be manipulated whilst wearing space/moon gloves! Or maybe it should be a foot activated pedal?
Oh shit... another consideration... you'd need to bolt the matt down because otherwise it'd just stick to the sole of their moon boots? Or even fly up and stick to the ceiling of the lander?!!
Pretty difficult to figure it all out actually.
Still, at least the gravity dial/selector thing is sorted! :D
A dial on the side?
How quaint. You use an app! Then, once the cost of running the servers gets a bit steep, you either offer a subscription service or brick it and sell them a new one.
Obviously they will need a broadband connection, but that is not your problem; I'm sure there will be a starlink offering.
" IIRC it's static that keeps it on the spacesuits..."
It's bone dry so there's a big problem with static electricity. It's easy to see all of the regolith that clung to the Apollo astronauts suits.
I've met a fair few of the moonwalkers and they describe the smell of the moon (once back inside the lander) as more like burnt cork rather than gunpowder.
I know this is a "Star Trek"/"B5"/"BuckRogers" type of super-sciffy solution but has anyone thought of a gentle shower in the airlocks?
Or wet-wipes?
Or both?
Okay, it's a bit expensive on the water front, in that it would mean actualy using some, but a 30 second rinse of the suits shouldn't use
too much.
The slurry could even be kept and used, or just analysed for Science and the dirty water could be re-used - at least most of it.
Too "2001 : A Space Odyssey" for real spaceships?
Wasn't some company going to build a machine that mixes moondust with ox blood to pave a highway for the moon buggies to trundle over? It was right here in these pages. Maybe we should first terraform the moon first before we send anybody up there. Every lunanaut will be kitted out with a BustDuster (TM).
Once terrified, Luna would not need dust busters. They dust would settle into clays and muds just as it does on a nearby, wetter planet.
As it mostly does there. Usually. With some local, temporary exceptions.
Unlike the local Big Sister World, though, there would not be any tectonics to cycle the muds from the bottom of the Lunar Ocean so any citizens
would need to build piping and pumps and ejectors at the top of the higher hills. [See the "Ringworld" series for details.]
Sorry for being pedantic but WTF is "resrarch?"
As In:
India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has published resrarch that reveals its Chandrayaan-3 mission made quite a mess on the Moon.
What happened to Spell Check?
Some seven hours after publication "resrarch" still shown??!!!
Otherwise and interesting article...
"What happened to Spell Check?"
A couple of things happened. Plenty of people wonder why words are being underlined with a red squiggly. Some believe that the way they spell the word is correct and the computer is being silly. Another group doesn't think it matters.
I misspell stuff all of the time, but I do go back and correct it. My bigger problem is not checking that what I have written is coherent before I hit "submit". Some of that is when I edit something and don't check my edit. Oh well. At least just about everything I post is spelled correctly. Mrs. Menzies would be proud.
"Buzz Aldrin, one of the first to be exposed to lunar dust, seems to be pretty much immortal"
Every time I'd see him he demonstrated clear mental problems. He wants people to land on Mars and I believe it's a better step to establish a base on the moon first. Clearly he's bonkers.
Actually, when I was involved more in journalism I would see Buzz quite often and it was like we both had Tourettes. When passing I'd cough 'moon' and he'd reply 'Mars' in something like a bark. It was all in fun and he's a real character. Charlie Duke was the most fun. Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart both contributed articles to the same magazine I worked for so I got to see them the most. I miss that job! The Apollo astronauts are/were amazing people.
> He wants people to land on Mars and I believe it's a better step to establish a base on the moon first. Clearly he's bonkers.
That's why the first Everest climb started from the top of Annapurna
I have never understood that argument.
Surely we should be doing both. And building cities from the mile-wide Asteroids, using Phobos (not the other one, it's pretty much useless),
colonising Mercury and Venus (yerp, that one could be done though it would not be easy) and building City-Farms in Earth's high orbits.
All at once.
And we should have started in the 1970's.
There was a time when we could have afforded it all, had the Dream Of Stars to drive it all, could have taken the Galaxy.
It is possible that the Dream is dead and we can not do any of these things, that we lack the treasure, the will and the ambition. That we are trapped.
But surely we should be trying?
I seem to recall there are much more serious concerns -- some of the moon dust easily reaches escape velocity and heads out into open space. Or orbit.
There will be moon-landing sites that are dust free and have exhaust-limiting blast walls to avoid blasting more moon dust into orbit.
There's a concept using a high power microwave emitter that trundles along the surface fusing the regolith into a solid surface. The trick is to be able to create roads with enough thickness so they can take the weight of rovers and rolligon buses. Laser fusion wouldn't likely work for more than a few mm. Perhaps there will be a combination of things that get used. Different frequency microwaves for building up the base from the bottom and a laser finishing pass for the best surface finish. Whatever is used will be high powered for certain so generating lots of energy and being able to route power all over will be important.
Then the telecomms guys will come to swap the copper for fibres. Then the water company will come to fix a leak ...
Oh, wait, the water guys just cut through the mains cables for that research base ...
Shouldn't someone have stored maps of all of those pipes, wires and other junk and supplied them to the Planners?
Happening right now in our village (I think it might now be officially classed as a small town, but it was definitely a village when I moved here). A couple months ago, the local authority finally got around to repairing potholes that had developed and worsened over the past few winters. One-by-one, parts of streets have been coned off (and traffic lights carefully positioned to cause the greatest traffic congestion). Once they had finished (only a month later than signposted) another crew has come in and are working their way around, digging holes to install fibre. It's not OpenReach and, when I asked one of the crew, it's for an independent ISP I don't recognise, so it will be interesting to see how it's going to be contracted - but that's beside the point.
To cap all these roadworks, a separate set of works has seen a few streets being completely relaid, not because they were particularly bad (seems totally random to the locals), nor ones with a lot of traffic (one is a dead-end - and that one was done twice as they screwed up the first time as almost all the chuckies remained loose). The main through road was just patched and, rather than avoiding the potholes when cycling along it, I now have to avoid the raised repairs.
SGN haven't been in yet - I expect they're waiting for the fibre crews to finish... I tell a lie - they were actually digging up one end of the High Street to locate a gas leak - ironically right around one of the larger pothole repairs.
At least, the indian mission has thrown more light on the potential issues, for which future astronoauts and space programmes can be aware of and take remedial measures.
All for a cost which is lesser than a blockbuster Hollywood movie making budget.
It has thrown more light and awareness on this phenomenon/hazard than all the other Lunar missions and landings has ever done. A very valid observation for science.
Well done India and keep it up.
Missions are just going to be expendable robots . Maybe they will give them AI voice ability. When it wears out it can go full on sad farewell speech so earthmen safe at home can blub and light candles to c3po, named after frenzied and violent campaign from star trek fans.
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