Went for a quick run this morning – I’ve found that one benefit of urban running is the spikes in adrenaline that come with dodging cars, cyclists, and pedestrians. Keeps things interesting.
Anyway, the search is on for a landing site for the next moon landing, which is supposed to go down by 2020. Landing site selection is a fascinating process. For one thing, it starts long before most people are aware there’s even a mission. You’ve got to go from an entire planet of possible sites to one location a few square kilometers in size. Along the way, a lot of great science comes out of it, because the process essentially is ranking or prioritizing sites by scientific merit. One location might be promising for a particular type of science while another could be better suited for a different objective. Also, by looking so closely at certain areas, you’re likely to see new geologic phenomena that have been missed in the past.
Take the moon for example. This latest batch of images (see below for an example) targets the south pole region where water ice may hide in crater shadows. They are 50 times more detailed than previous images of the same area, and reveal remarkable topography – mountains more than 20,000 feet high and canyons more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. Lunar science excites some people more than others, but it’s hard to argue that the views would be stunning.
In other planetary science news, Phoenix continues to analyze ice/soil mixtures in its wet chemistry experiment. Is it just me, or has this mission been particularly slow-moving? Not that there’s really any hurry, but it seems like each round of experiments takes at least a week. One of the current issues appears to be the mechanics of scooping up the soil. The robotic arm has a number of tools with which to grind up and collect the ice-cemented soil, but the scoop appears to just be pushing clods of soil along the surface, kind of like trying to use a dustpan without the broom. This picture gives a sense of the issue – you can see how the scoop has just push the soil forward into little mounds:
But NASA engineers are nothing if not innovative, and I have no doubt that they will be able to use various components of the spacecraft, nearby rocks, and maybe even kind-hearted Martians to get around this problem.
Wow, I had no idea they (presumably Nasa) are already looking seriously at potential landing sites.
You didn’t say where the new images of the south pole come from – are they from the Chinese probe that went into orbit last year?
Surprisingly, these new images are from a rather old-school source: the Goldstone solar system radar – a ground-based system using an array of enormous satellite dishes in the Mojave Desert. The initial NASA press release can be found here.
You are going to have to forgive my ignorance yet again. What sorts of experiments are in the plans for the next lunar mission? They will be determined in part by the landing site that they choose, right? (That’s totally cool, by the way. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of the mission). They haven’t found ice on the moon, or have they? (Again, I am a microbiologist. I look at very small things. This is a very very big thing, so I know embarrassingly little about it). This is an unmanned mission we are discussing, right?
Good questions Anna, sorry for the lack of detail! Nope, we’re talking manned missions, though certainly unmanned probes would go first, and they have indeed found ice on the moon. See next post for more details!