APOD: Yutu Rover Rolls onto the Moon (2013 Dec 16)

Comments and questions about the APOD on the main view screen.
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Nitpicker
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Re: APOD: Yutu Rover Rolls onto the Moon (2013 Dec 16)

Post by Nitpicker » Fri Dec 20, 2013 7:36 am

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
Russ wrote:Will there be news about China's newly declared air identification defense zone over the Mare Imbrium
neufer wrote:
Anthony Barreiro wrote:
Do you know if NASA got permission to fly the LRO over the Chinese landing site? :-|
A spokesman for NASA stated that "The U.S. will continue conducting flight operations in the region, including with our allies and partners.... We will not register a flight plan, we will not identify our transponder, our radio frequency and logo."
If Neufer says it, it must be true. :-|
Russ was implying that the Chinese government might make similar declarations on the Mare Imbrium (or Sea of Rains) as it has done recently on the South China Sea. I have read nothing in any way credible, that would suggest such a declaration on the Mare Imbrium. The quote from neufer's "spokesman for NASA" is actually from Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren, after recent reports that:
Two U.S. Air Force B-52 long range bombers flew what U.S. officials are calling a “routine training mission” through airspace over the East China that China is claiming as a new air defense identification zone. Entering the zone without notifying Chinese authorities on Monday was the first U.S. challenge to China’s controversial move that has increased tensions in the region.
Full article here:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/20 ... ense-zone/

Neufer is just showing off his bad intelligence and Russ' implication is about 400,000km off target.

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neufer
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Re: APOD: Yutu Rover Rolls onto the Moon (2013 Dec 16)

Post by neufer » Fri Dec 20, 2013 2:48 pm


Anthony Barreiro wrote:
If Neufer says it, it must be true. :-|
Art Neuendorffer

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Using the Moon as a Telescopic Platform

Post by BDanielMayfield » Sat Dec 21, 2013 7:13 pm

neufer wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3 wrote: <<The Chang'e 3 lander is equipped with a 150 mm Ritchey–Chrétien telescope that will be used to observe galaxies, active galactic nuclei, variable stars, binaries, novae, quasars and blazars in the near-UV band (245-340 nm), and is capable of detecting objects at a brightness as low as magnitude 13. The thin atmosphere and slow rotation of the Moon allow extremely long, uninterrupted observations of a target. The LUT will be the first long term lunar-based astronomical observatory, making continuous observations of important celestial bodies to study their light variation and better improve our current models. The lander also carries an extreme ultraviolet camera, which will be used to observe the Earth's plasmasphere in order to examine its structure and dynamics and to investigate how it is affected by solar activity.>>
I just want to express happiness that this mission has been successful so far. Just because our Moon is relatively close doesn’t make this accomplishment cheep or easy. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have taken so long between successful landings. And I’m very happy that human beings are beginning to put the Moon to use as a stable platform for the telescopic study of space. This use of the Moon is so logical, why hasn’t it been done before now? I hope and believe that one day, a more united human family will be able to utilize our nearest neighbor in space to study the sky as never before. Imagine how the Moon might be used for telescopes of all types and sizes! With sufficiently advanced technology, even observatories larger than anything conceivable on earth might someday be constructed on the Moon.

Bruce
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Re: Using the Moon as a Telescopic Platform

Post by neufer » Sat Dec 21, 2013 11:15 pm

BDanielMayfield wrote:
And I’m very happy that human beings are beginning to put the Moon to use as a stable platform for the telescopic study of space. This use of the Moon is so logical, why hasn’t it been done before now?
Most space telescopes:
  • 1) don't require mounts
    2) use solar energy 24/7 and
    3) point away from both the Sun & Earth.
This is more easily accomplished from space than on the surface of the moon.
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: Using the Moon as a Telescopic Platform

Post by Chris Peterson » Sat Dec 21, 2013 11:26 pm

neufer wrote:
BDanielMayfield wrote:
And I’m very happy that human beings are beginning to put the Moon to use as a stable platform for the telescopic study of space. This use of the Moon is so logical, why hasn’t it been done before now?
Most space telescopes:
  • 1) don't require mounts
    2) use solar energy 24/7 and
    3) point away from both the Sun & Earth.
This is more easily accomplished from space than on the surface of the moon.
Even with the Moon's low gravity, maintaining the shape of large mirrors is a challenge. The microgravity of space is what you want. Plus, there's no reason for a telescope to be manned, but if you want to make it serviceable, a near-Earth orbit makes sense.

The far side of the Moon is attractive for locating radio telescopes, however, since Earth interference is extremely small.
Chris

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More tuneable than LARC to shepherd's ear

Post by neufer » Sun Dec 22, 2013 3:03 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
The far side of the Moon is attractive for locating radio telescopes, however, since Earth interference is extremely small.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/moonscope-0215.html wrote: MIT to lead development of new telescopes on moon
David Chandler, MIT News Office, February 15, 2008

<<NASA has selected a proposal by an MIT-led team to develop plans for an array of radio telescopes on the far side of the moon that would probe the earliest formation of the basic structures of the universe. The new MIT telescopes would explore one of the greatest unknown realms of astronomy, the so-called "Dark Ages" near the beginning of the universe when stars, star clusters and galaxies first came into existence. This period of roughly a billion years, beginning shortly after the Big Bang, closely followed the time when cosmic background radiation, which has been mapped using satellites, filled all of space. Learning about this unobserved era is considered essential to filling in our understanding of how the earliest structures in the universe came into being.

The Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) project is headed by Jacqueline Hewitt, a professor of physics and director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Science. LARC includes nine other MIT scientists as well as several from other institutions. It is planned as a huge array of hundreds of telescope modules designed to pick up very-low-frequency radio emissions. The array will cover an area of up to two square kilometers; the modules would be moved into place on the lunar surface by automated vehicles.

Observations of the cosmic Dark Ages are impossible to make from Earth, Hewitt explains, because of two major sources of interference that obscure these faint low-frequency radio emissions. One is the Earth's ionosphere, a high-altitude layer of electrically charged gas. The other is all of Earth's radio and television transmissions, which produce background interference everywhere on the Earth's surface. The only place that is totally shielded from both kinds of interference is the far side of the moon, which always faces away from the Earth and therefore is never exposed to terrestrial radio transmissions.

Besides being the top priority scientifically for a telescope on the moon, this low-frequency radio telescope array will also be one of the easiest to build, Hewitt says. That's because the long wavelengths of the radio waves it will detect don't require particularly accurate placement and alignment of the individual components. In addition, it doesn't matter if a few of the hundreds of antennas fail, and their performance would not be affected by the ever-present lunar dust.

The new lunar telescopes would add greatly to the capabilities of a low-frequency radio telescope array now under construction in Western Australia, one of the most radio-quiet areas on Earth. This array, which also involves MIT researchers, will be limited to the upper reaches of the low-frequency radio spectrum (> 50 MHZ), and thus will only be able to penetrate into a portion of the cosmic Dark Ages.

According to prevailing theory, this unobserved span of time in the universe's infancy includes a period when dark matter--an unknown component of the universe that accounts for a majority of all matter--collapsed from a uniform soup of particles into clumps that formed the scaffolding for all the structures that emerged later, from stars and black holes to entire galaxies. All astronomical observations made so far only reveal the results of that whole formation process--except the cosmic background radiation, which only shows the raw material before the process began. The whole gestation and birth of all the kinds of objects seen in space today, which all took place in the Dark Ages, has so far been hidden from view.

The new observations could test current theories about how the universe formed and evolved into its present state, including the theory of cosmic inflation first proposed by MIT Professor Alan Guth. In addition to their primary mission, the new telescopes would also be useful for studying huge eruptions from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, which can sometimes disrupt communications and electrical grids on Earth. They could also study space weather, the radio emissions from other planets and emissions from collisions between galaxies.

The present plan is for a one-year study to develop a detailed plan for the telescope array, whose construction would probably not begin until sometime after the year 2025, and is expected to cost more than $1 billion. The project to develop the plan is led by MIT's Hewitt, with a team that includes MIT professors Jeffrey Hoffman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Maria Zuber, chair of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, as well as others from MIT and scientists from Harvard, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To develop this detailed plan, NASA is awarding a grant of $500,000, to be divided between the MIT-led team and a second team that is independently developing a similar proposal, headed by scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory.>>
Art Neuendorffer

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