If you're ever lost on the Moon, Ordnance Survey now has you covered for Apollo 11 anniversary The UK's Ordnance Survey has followed up the Mars map with a little something to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in its own, distinctive cartographic style. Paul Naylor, programme chair and council member of the British Cartographic Society, spent three weeks painstakingly piecing together data to …
I already have t-shirts and a mug for the 50th anniversary of one of my fondest childhood memories (and one of mankind's greatest achievements), so I might as well add the this map. Alternatively, I will stick to imaging the moon.
I'm the same age and remember us being led from class into the Infants school hall to watch it on TV. A relatively big (for the day), 24" ish, B+W with the matt black cupboard doors and shade across the top to 'enhance the experience'.
Grainy images and very excited adults
To this day, it remains one of my most influential memories.
I can just remember being 30, I could drink a gallon of larger and then dance until the wee hours of the morning before stopping off for a kebab on the way home, and I could still get into work after a just a couple of hours of sleep. Now I'm the wrong side of 50, its five pints at most, and I'm n bed before midnight, and no chance of going to work the next day. 50 is not the new 30.
I remember watching the first moon landing descent (with the computer program alarms) when I was in college. It was exciting.
I was also listening to the live feed when Apollo 13 blew an oxygen bottle. The only time I heard an astronaut get excited was when ground control said, "turn off the react on oxygen bottle #1."
"Did you say, 'turn off the react on oxygen bottle #1?!?!' "
"That's affirmative"
At that moment the mission was scrubbed. The news commentators never had a clue and were wondering if the mission would proceed. I was wondering if the astronauts would make it back. They were not on a free return path to Earth, They had powered down the command module's inertial platform before they powered up the lander's platform and had to align it. They couldn't see any stars because of the debris from the explosion.
Once they got things more or less under control they did a small burn to get them back to Earth. "The Atlantic ocean?" "We're working on it."
Eventually another small burn got them to a Pacific ocean landing.
Just before landing they powered up the command module. The news commentators were worried if there was enough battery power - still no clue as the battery in the command module was designed to handle re-entry.
These are just some of my my recollections - I never saw the movie.
I'm also a bit of a mapoholic. GPS is handy, but really only lets people get lost to a high degree of accuracy. You are here, in this blank space shown on your satnav, and it can't route you to where you want to go because it can't find any roads. Or it may happily direct you over a cliff because it doesn't understand contours. Which is a bit of a challenge for people with GPS enabled gadgets who fancy a spot of outdoor activity. Landranger + gizmo makes it a whole lot easier to set waypoints for an easy/strenuous hike.
Best thing about OS is it's backed off a bit from it's initial land-grab, ie as commercialisation crept it, so did.. interesting licence conditions for GIS like wanting to charge a hefty fee per map tile displayed. With likely roaming charges Moon-Earth, licence fees for any digital Lunar Landranger might put a spanner on the first ever Lunar Orienteering event.
(I guess some old traditions live on, ie the use of 'easter eggs' to aid copyright claims on maps is an old trick..)
... the tires are steel mesh, with titanium treads, I'd recommend fence pliars. I have several pair of these, all over 25 years old. Spendy, but you get what you pay for ... and I'll bet a plugged nickle that NASA's procurement process could up that by a couple orders of magnitude.
(Of course I should have added a reference to the incomparable theme music. Saturday mornings have been empty since.)
... in this kind of thing, National Geographic has a very nice gift for the kid(s) in your life who might be inspired by this kind of thing. I've had a copy for decades, and usually have a couple extra copies in shipping tubes, just in case.
They also have a Mars map, a star map ("map of the heavens"), and a map of the Milky Way. Recommended.
Whoosh.
Where do you think the government gets its funding?
The tax payer funds the company and then has to pay again for the product of that company.
You're suggesting we thank them for shafting us?!?
Just part of the joy of living in rip-off Britain.
Whoosh.
People who buy their products value what they've bought higher than the cash they've forked out (otherwise they wouldn't have bought them). OS makes a profit, therefore they tax-payer thanks them for those funds that otherwise the tax-payer would have to provide. Doesn't seem like too much of a rip-off to me.
The Yanks (with help) build the tech to get there in 1969, and 50 years later the Brits follow up the rear with a paper map.
Don't get me wrong, the OS deserver massive respect for this - especially if it engages the younger generation to continue the push into space exploration. But it's a bitter-sweet taste. Probably tinged with realisation that at 52 (53 next week) I'm unlikely to see the next big thing.
Yes, but how do I know which side is up? A genuine question - do compasses or GPS work on the lunar surface? Wikipedia says that the moon's magnetic field is a couple orders of magnitudes weaker than earth's. You have good line of sight to many GPS satellites, though. They are much farther off, but the signal does not have to go through an atmosphere. But will receivers get confused by the altitude reading?
An interesting question. You'd be about twenty times further from the GNSS satellites (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, JXSS) than those of us on the earth, so you'd have to deal with signals about 400 times fainter. That assumes that the GPS signals are only mildly focussed on the earth; if the antennae are sufficiently directional, it could be you'd lose even more power than that. There is also some "geometric dilution of position", the effect you can get on earth if the only satellites you can see are in a single part of the sky (used to be very common in the 1990s, when there weren't many satellites up there yet, and I think you can still get this problem in "urban canyons"). On the Moon, the entire GNSS constellation would only subtend about six degrees in the sky, so you'd always have a pretty low-grade sort of position fix.
Come to think of it... the MMS (Multiple Magnetospheric Satellites) use GPS to determine where they are in the magnetosphere, and they go fairly high up. So there must be a good bit of GPS signal that goes right past the earth and could be received on the moon.
On the plus side, there's no atmospheric effects going on (specifically, ionospheric effects). The GPS satellites transmit on two frequencies so you can compensate for this. But still, not having to worry about it at all would presumably be worth something.
I'm sure an off-the-shelf GPS unit will be confused by the altitude. (I vaguely recall some "throttling" being done, on at least some units, to make it difficult to repurpose them for ballistic missiles.) But if you're going to the moon, paying for a modified unit capable of latching on to faint signals and figuring out how the position works on the moon ought to be the least of your problems. Presumably, the MMS folks have some prior art here.
In the event you get enough signals, which is a collection of distances from known positions (the satellites), the kit will calculate an XYZ coordinate - yes, rectangular - then translate that onto the spheroid (mathematical model of the earth), then bodge THAT onto the geoid (basically a database of many of the ways the earth ISNT mathematically shaped).
Plenty of places where error trapping will say the values are out of bounds, and go away until you have some meaningful numbers. You would need a lunar spheroid model, and possibly an equivalent of the geoid, depending on how much separation there is between the model and reality.
Or you could accept low accuracy, after all, finding your own car in the carpark should be relatively unchallenging for a while yet.
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