vacation on the Moon: |Mond2020

Would you like to vacation on the Moon:

— -ice- (@icelefant) 29. Dezember 2015

|Space |Science |Center: Forward This To An Awesome Friend

Getting my moon photos ready. Freezing my eyepiece off lol Might need to wait a month or 2 before getting a DSLR   @Antiproton_com 13h twitter.com The cosmonaut exhibition @sciencemuseum is a design delight. #cosmonaut #design #science #space #russia #ussr   @_jonathanmckee 15h twitter.com Gassendi Crater   @Betelgeuse10 18h twitter.com The moon on Nov 22, 2015. Canon 7D 200mm, cropped.   @Abana09 18h twitter.com The Space-Sites Daily is out! paper.li/icelefant/1306… Stories via @ananddamanica @orbitalblue @soyrobo   @icelefant 5h paper.li The icelefant Daily is out! paper.li/icelefant?edit… Stories via @UniphiSpaceAge @GTCtelescope @stephenodonnell   @icelefant 20h paper.li

back to Moon |Lunar X Prize

back to Moon As-it-happens update ⋅ December 18, 2014
Tech Times Google extends Lunar X Prize deadline to 2016 it is to develop a rover, send it to the moon, drive it 1,640 feet and then transmit "HDTV Mooncasts" back to Earth (whew). So, it's now extended the ...

Faszination Moon |NASA

#Moon #Apollo11 

Hier die allerersten Foto, das je ein Mensch auf dem Mond gemacht hat:
Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin direkt beim Flagge aufstellen!

Quelle:

Apollo 11 Image Library

Figure Captions Copyright © 1995-2009 by Eric M. Jones and Ken Glover.
All rights reserved.
HTML Design by Brian W. Lawrence.
Last revised 31 January 2014.

conjunction of the Moon|Venus

on |Space |Science |Center's RebelMouse and thought you'd like it!
There's a very close conjunction of the Moon Venus 25. Feb. 2014

#astronomy #Moonwatch

Quelle: TwitterSite

   

wat is a Space Cows?

Slaying Sacred Space Cows:

by dennis ray wingo

I spend a fair amount of time discussing space development with people, in presentations,  blogs, and in personal conversations.  Most people who know me know that one of my prime foci is off planet industrialization, principally beginning with orbital space and then the Moon.  One of the most baffling and tragic responses that I get in this realm is the complete dismissal of the entire concept.  The back and forth in someone else’s blog thread is never satisfying because you cannot develop more than a short stream of thought and when the other person/persons are simply dismissive, no real progress is made.  Thus in this missive I am going to go into some of my basic thoughts regarding lunar industrialization and see if we can get beyond these, in my opinion, misunderstandings regarding how hard it is.

Background

As is my way in developing these ideas lets begin with how things are done here on the Earth and then see how they might develop on the Moon.  I always look at history as a guide.  I grew up near Birmingham Alabama, then called “The Pittsburg of the South”.  Some of my earliest memories are of riding in a car by the big steel mills in Ensley, Fairfield, and downtown (Sloss furnaces) Alabama.

These places always fascinated me as you could see the hot steel ingots being stamped, rolled, and worked from the car.  At Sloss you could see the hot steel being poured from the ladles into molds.  Many of my friends that I grew up with now work at steel mills like Fairfield, ACIPCO, O’Neal Steel, and others.  While I have not worked at any of these myself, I know a pretty good bit about them and have used their products in hardware that we have built, such as our 22,500 lb steel solar/wind trailers.  Figure 1 is a picture of the frame of our solar/wind trailer under construction:

Figure 1: The GSW-7000 Solar/Wind Trailer Frame Under Construction, Centreville Maryland, 2011

The trailer under construction in the picture above is made from standard A-36 steel.  The frame parts are made from tube, “c” channel, flat plate, and square tubes.  All of these parts are welded together using very simple frames, c clamps, and other devices to hold the pieces together while they are welded.  This principle is pretty much how most heavy equipment is built, with the larger production lines being more automated.  The pieces here came from a steel distributor and were cut into the right lengths/sizes using laser and or plasma cutters.

This background is provided in order to convey to the reader a small sense of my history with steel as well as a bit of information on how vehicles are put together in a low production environment.  There is nothing magic about how this is done, just simple steel products welded together by competent people who do this as a living.  I love metals and have spent a lot of my life around heavy equipment and its uses, especially in the coal mining industry.  Thus I can at least speak with some knowledge of the subject here on the Earth.  The interesting part is how to translate this to how we would do such things on the Moon.

Basic Things Needed for Lunar Industrialization

There are four basic things needed for basic lunar industrialization.

• Raw Materials
• Energy
• Manufacturing Infrastructure
• Workforce

Availability of Lunar Metals

It is well known from the literature (one example) on the Apollo samples (the greatest part of their legacy) that there is meteoric metals and nano phase iron in proportions up to 1%.  Apollo 16 samples, being from a highlands site has the greatest proportion of meteoric materials, which is to be expected as the highlands have the oldest regolith.  Thus if we were to do the most minimal processing of highlands regolith from a site at the North pole (my favored location for many reasons), then we can expect to obtain quite a bit of metal. Beneficiation, or concentrating, of this metal could be accomplished on the Moon with nothing more than an electromagnet and a dump truck rover.   There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that a robotic rover with a magnet could not pick up a minimum of 100 kilograms per hour of this meteoric metal.  This can be done without any of the exotic chemical or other methods of separating metals from their oxides on the Moon.

Melting and Forming the Metal

There are different ways of melting metal but they all require energy.  For the Moon there are two easy ways to do it.  The first way is to simply use the sun and all you need to do it is a fresnel lens.  Here is a video of a guy who does just that, with a very simple and lightweight system:

Here is a second and much faster method using a parabolic mirror:

If you notice the video closely you will see that they only used a small fraction of the available light on the parabolic mirror to melt the steel.  At the lunar north pole where up to 100% of the time it is sunlit (Northern hemisphere summer) there is plenty of sun to support a continuous operating foundry.

The second means, using indirect sunlight in the form of electrical power, is achieved by using an induction furnace.  The next video shows that:

So what we have here are two different methods of melting metals that would be directly applicable to melting metals on the Moon, even with a lot of rock contamination, which since rock is lighter, floats to the top and is scooped off as slag.

The next video shows metal pouring and forming.  The sand mold method of metal casting is as old as the Hittite empire, long before Rome.  The video here is from a British television program called “Metal Monkeys”.

Remember at the beginning of this article where in figure one the trailer is made from welded pieces of steel?  It is quite simple using the sand mold process to make the basic parts that go into the trailer frame construction.  On the Moon it would be done using sintering of the regolith using microwaves after forming the desired part:  Figure 2 shows my concept of the induction furnace and mold that would be used to build structures on the Moon:

Figure 2: This shows a vacuum induction furnace on the surface of the Moon that would be used to melt and pour metal. Click to Enlarge.

Uses of Metal On the Moon

There is no end of the uses of metal on the Moon.  For simple parts and objects the manufacturing infrastructure is minimal.  All that was used in the construction of our trailers in figure 1 was saw horses to hold the frame, C clamps to hold the pieces together while they are tacked together, and then a bridge crane to lift the assembly and turn it over during the production process.  Obviously you need a welder as well, but on the Moon welding is very easy and you could use a laser welder, which requires a lot of power but little in the way of consumables or good old concentrated sunlight again.

Figure 3 shows an Eagle Engineering design of the LOTRAN rover on the Moon:

Figure 3: LOTRAN Rover, made from aluminum tubes as can be seen in the drawing -- Click to Enlarge

Figure four below shows a lunar habitat with structure holding up the weight of the regolith radiation shielding:

Figure 4: 
From Eagle Engineering, Lunar Habitat and Support Structure for Regolith Shielding -- 
Click to Enlarge

In figure 3 and 4 there are many of the structural pieces that, rather than being brought up from the Earth, could be derived from local ISRU derived metals.  Even the habitats themselves could be made mostly from locally derived metals.  There is a class of steel called “Maraging Steel” that is a high nickel alloy that is very close to what you would have available from meteoric and nano phase iron derived from the regolith.

Slaying Sacred Space Cows With a Gestalt Tempered Blade

One of the sacred cows that drives the demand for a heavy lift vehicle is that ISRU is not ready for prime time, that it is too hard, and that it is something that will happen in 20, 50, or 100 years, pick your time.  A friend of mine who was on the Augustine II commission told me that Norm Augustine simply would not allow any discussion of ISRU as an enabling technology for transforming the Constellation program.  He said that he simply did not believe it was possible.  In another blog forum recently when I brought up the possibility of making rover parts from ISRU derive metal, the person I was interacting with simply refused to carry on the conversation as for me to even mention that was to shift the discussion into the non-credible.

After reading this somewhat long post I hope that the reader will get the idea that obtaining, melting, and forming metal is no big deal.  As someone who grew up with and continues to work with steel I find it astonishing when otherwise intelligent people simply dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.  There is absolutely nothing precluding a metals centric ISRU implementation on the Moon that would have an immediate upstream effect on the entire architecture for lunar/Mars exploration.

In all of the discussions about heavy lift, I have never been able to find anyone who can list more than a few payloads that require a heavy lifter.  These are things such as a habitats, pressurized rovers, power systems, and humans.  With a robust implementation of ISRU coupled with the landing of modest equipment with existing vehicles, the need for heavy lift is completely eliminated.

That is a sacred cow worth slaying…

Quelle:

Dennis Wingo is an advocate for the discussion of ways and means for the economic development of the solar system, to the benefit of the Earth. He writes the euphonious blog Dennis Wingo.

Flow Boundary in Mare Imbrium |LROC

The same field of view at a slightly less inclined morning incidence angle (60.84°), LROC NAC M129452673R, orbit 4211, May 25, 2010, resolution 0.46 meters from 37.66 kilometers [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

A small scarp is exposed in this high sunrise incidence angle (75.95°) Narrow Angle Camera frame, around 95 kilometers north by northeast of Mons La Hire in Mare Imbrium. The area to the east is raised relative to the area on the west of the scarp by as little as 10 meters. LROC NAC M177792062L, LRO orbit 11337, December 6, 2011; field of view 610 meters, resolution 0.6 meters per pixel from 43.86 kilometers. View the full-size LROC Featured Image HERE [NASA/GSFC/ArizonaState University].

Drew Enns

LROC News System

Today's Featured Image shows the boundary of a flow front in Mare Imbrium. Unlike other flows LROC has observed (granular, impact melt), these are lava flows! The flows are about 35 m thick, making them hard to observe unless the Sun is low and casting long shadows.

Apollo 15 imaged the flows early in the lunar morning, when the Sun was low on the horizon to help the low relief flows cast larger shadows!

Combining the observed geometric properties of these flows with viscosities calculated from the Apollo samples allow scientists to constrain how lava behaves on the Moon.

For context, the full, uncorrected approximate 2200 meter width of the field of view swept up in LROC NAC M129452673R. The area of interest is just left of center [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) context for the LROC Featured Image, released April 11, 2012 and narrowly focused near 30.593° N, 335.302° E. The WAC observation above was swept up from the orbiter during the same orbital pass as that of the Featured Image NAC frame. The large incidence angle brings out subtle changes in topography, enhancing the Imbrium lava flows. Image field of view is 35 kilometers. LROC WAC M177791761C (604nm), resolution 60 meters per pixel [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

The Imbrium flows are fairly thick, and the WAC context shows them extending for at least 120 km, but the flows continue for several hundred kilometers. Should we expect this? Because the Moon's gravity is weaker than the Earth's, we can expect lunar lava flows to be ~1.7 times as thick as a terrestrial flow of similar length! 

Flows of similar length on Earth have only been observed in flood basalts, which are large volumes of lava that were erupted quickly. 

This correlation indicates that the lunar lava flows must have erupted quickly as well. Even so, these flows are some of the few examples still visible on the Moon's surface, and it is unclear how their thickness and extent relate to the majority of volcanism that filled in the large basins resulting in the maria.

Check out more lava related feature posts below and explore the lava flows in the full LROC NAC Featured Image, HERE.

Related Posts:

Layers near Apollo 15 landing site

Layering in Euler Crater

Old Man River of Lava

Lunar Pioneer, LLP

Quelle: #NASA #JPL

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Copernicus Crater |Moon

LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) visible to ultraviolet portrait of Copernicus crater, image 458 km wide 

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Flight video of the Moon |DMK 31AU03.AS

Alexander Zaitsev's Moon Flight!! "just enjoy"...

Not so Simple!

A step is present in between a small crater's floor and rim. The crater also displays a high density of boulders on its surface. Image width is 330 m, LROC NAC M122700360L

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Rim on a Rim

A small fresh crater is positioned on the rim of Hermann B crater. Material slides down the crater wall to the crater's center, creating small headscarps along the rim. Image width is 650 m, LROC NAC M117867678RE

 [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Outcrops in Laplace A |Moon

Debris flows and outcrops exposed in the walls of Laplace A crater. Illumination from southwest, image is ~525 m across, down-slope is to the right, LROC NAC M137725771R

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Continue reading "Outcrops in Laplace A"

Craggy Peak, Impact Melts |LROC

Northern slope of one of four central peaks in Hayn crater, on the northern edge of Humboldtianum basin. Downslope direction is from top to bottom (North is down), image field of view is 594 meters, sunlight is from upper left. LROC NAC observation M128754462L, orbit 4108, resolution 0.54 meters from 51.78 kilometers. View the full size LROC Featured Image HERE  [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Hiroyuki Sato

LROC News System

Due to the tremendous energy released by an impact event large portions of the target rock is melted. This impact melt forms distinctive flows and ponds both inside and outside of its parent crater. In many young craters the #LROC-NAC has captured deposits that look as if they formed yesterday.

Today's Featured Image is on the northern slope of the Hayn crater central peak. Due to the peak's steepness, it is rough and craggy. In many places on the peak wavy deposits are seen between crags and blocks; these deposits are most likely impact melt. Truly amazing, first the central peak formed then impact melt splashed down and coated it. If this interpretation is correct you can say that the peak formed in matter of a few seconds, quickly enough that melt that was thrown during the impact had not yet landed! Quantitative measurements of these kind of spectacular outcrops, using new accurate topography from LROC NAC stereo will help reveal how impact craters form.

#LROC QuickMap WAC monochrome 125 meter per pixel projection of Hayn and vicinty, centered at 64.34°N, 83.94°E. The yellow arrow indicates the locations of LROC Featured Image field of view [#NASA/#GSFC/#Arizona-State-University].

Hayn is an exceptionally deep crater because it is situated just within the northern mountainous ring of 550 km-wide Humboldtianum basin, which extends far beyond its deep interior Mare Humboldtianum. The entire basin straddles the 90° east meridian, though Mare Humboldtianum is a nearside basin visible at favorable lunar librations. The floor of Hayn is 4.9 kilometers below global mean elevation and it's northern crater rim is still more than a half kilometer below global mean. The mountain directly north of Hayn, a worn remnant of the Humboldtianum basin rim is 2.3 kilometers above global mean, nearly a seven thousand meter change in elevation over the eighty kilometers between that massif and the center of Hayn. LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) 100 meter per pixel digital terrain model, color shaded relief, orthographic projection centered on 60° east [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Explore the craggy peak and impact melt deposits, both on the peak and the floor of Hayn crater, HERE.

Related Posts:

On the floor of Green M

Splash and flow

Ejecta in Tycho crater

Natural Bridge on the Moon!

Lunar Pioneer, LLP


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GRAIL-A |inorbit

GRAIL-A arrived successfully in lunar orbit, New Years Eve.
GRAIL-B is thirty hours behind, scheduled to arrive for the
tandem high-precision lunar gravity mapping mission on
the first day of 2012, when the United States will have five
spacecraft in orbit around the Moon for the first time [NASA].
Read the full story HERE.
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Live Webcasts of Total Lunar Eclipse

In case you are clouded out of this Saturday's Total Lunar Eclipse,

here is a list of live webcam events that I know of (I'll post more as I find them).

Some of these may be over subscribed, so try a couple.


Slooh Events
Amateur Astronomers Association Delhi
Astronomers Without Borders
Live webcast of 10th Dec Lunar Eclipse
Night Skies Networks
Live webcast of 10th Dec Lunar Eclipse From Dedicated Domain
SEMS University of North Dakota SEMS project 3 minutes of totality from Grand Forks.
SWAN from India.

Quelle: Ian Musgrave

Look at Moon |Photos

Look at the Moon... oh wait!

Mr. Moon Wizzard again
quelle: Tanja Rathjen

Detour! |Moon

A high albedo granular flow traveled down the wall of Dionysius crater. Why is the flow curving around the crater floor?

LROC NAC M111484008R, image width is 500 m [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

quelle: LROC News System

Shades of Grey |Moon

Two streaks of high and low reflectance blocky ejecta from the same crater. A large boulder rests in the low reflectance deposit. LROC NAC M168862555R, image width is 500 m

[NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Quelle:

Continue reading "Shades of Grey"

LROC Moon |Nature's Art

Western half of an unusual unnamed crater and its ejecta near the center of Mare Serenitatis. LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) observation M139795376L, LRO orbit 5735, September 22, 2010; field of view 600 meters, incidence angle 28° from an altitude of 43.91 kilometers.  View the full size LROC Featured Image HERE [NASA/GSFC/Arizona  State University].

Hiroyuki Sato

LROC News System

In many cases crater ejecta patterns on the Moon 
result in natural art.



Unlike the ejecta on the Earth and Mars, ejecta on th
Moon does not interact with an atmosphere.


Thus the final pattern on the ground is solely a reflection the 
dynamics of impact cratering. Today's Featured Image highlights 
the western half of an unnamed crater located in the middle of
Mare Serenitatis. The crater diameter is about
470 meters.

Context view of today's Featured Image, showing a wider view of the unnamed crater ejecta. Field of view close to the full  2.2 kilometer width of LROC NAC frame M139795376L. See the larger context image accompanying the image  release HERE [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

As seen in the second picture (a zoom-out of the same NAC frame), one third of the ejecta blanket (the western portion) is missing, probably due to an oblique impact from west to east. In the top image (near the crater center), almost all of the boulders are ejected in the northwest and southwest direction. The fine particles, however, extend out to the west in patterns not unlike a delicate lace. Studying the full variety of craters with distinctive ejecta patterns is key to understanding the dynamics of oblique impact events.

LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) 100 meter per-pixel monochrome mosaic of the center of the Mare Serenitatis basin. The yellow arrow and blue square show the location of the LROC Featured Image and the full NAC observation's footprint. See the larger WAC context image HERE [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Explore this beautiful ejecta blanket in the full NAC frame!

Another very familiar crater famous for its asymmetric ejecta and as a nearside landmark of the Moon in an evening sky is bright Proclus - with lighthouse rays guarding "the gates" separating distinctive Palus Somni from Mare Crisium. View  of the crater from Earth on March 29, 2010 from a  spectacular full lunar disk mosaic by Astronominsk compared with LRO Nominal Mission LROC WAC image [Aстроноmинск (Луна) - NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Related posts:

Ray of boulders

Slice of Mare

How did I form?

Asymmetric Ejecta

Lunar Pioneer, LLP

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