#nasa couldn't land on the moon even if they had the technology

[sepdet]

Have you SEEN the original moon landing feed, especially the scary bit near the end?

Now stay with me. I grew up hearing about these few minutes from my parents (in fact I took the TV they watched it on to grad school; DS9 and Babylon5 worked well in b&w).

This is even crazier than it looks like.

My parents were both scientists, my grandmother a planetarium director, and my dad was just about to land his job at a rocket company that built 95 small rockets that were part of the UpGoer Saturn V. (Yeah. Just the small ones. Saturn V was a BEAST.)

So my parents had a fair idea how dangerous this was, how Neil going manual was a bad sign, and just how close he was to running empty and crashing. They knew the problem that every ounce of fuel you carry requires even more fuel to lift off, so the Eagle was built light, carrying no excess weight even in fuel (it had to lift off the Moon with no rocket, after all).

But they didn't learn until years later just how jury-rigged and bespoke Apollo technology was. Every vehicle and part was designed like a Mythbusters build: extremely customized for the procedures it had to accomplish, using parts and even technology invented for specific mission tasks.

rope memory, predecessor to modern silicon chips: 1s and 0s woven by women (of course) at a Massachusetts textile plant

At the time, computers were the size of rooms and very touchy. Apollo's computer memory was core rope memory, never used before or since, to save space. The read/write guidance computer, too, was woven: physical media could better survive the rigors of space travel. (I suspect even my parents don't know it also used some of the very first integrated circuits, soldered by hand under a microscope by Navajo women).

Spacesuits were (and still are) designed and hand-stitched by Playtex bramakers. The lunar rovers' wheels were titanium meshes woven with piano wire to let dust through, and even had a clever navigation system despite no GPS or magnetic north.

They couldn't test these rigs with computer modeling. They didn't know for sure what the moon's surface would be like, apart from basic parameters like low gravity and near vacuum and a temperature ranging from 250°F in the sun to -250° in the shade. And it was nearly impossible to test for or practice in those conditions on Earth.

And then there were the unknowns. A massive solar flare between Apollo 16 and 17 might have killed or sickened them too much to operate their ship.

While the spacesuit and to some extent the rover design carried on, a lot of these hacks were so unusual that they might as well be alien tech. (I'm sorry woven technology fell out of vogue for several decades.) That goes some way towards explaining why humans haven't left Earth orbit since I was two.

The other problem, of course, is expense. Tech for human space exploration requires as much R&D and testing as fighter planes, which have developed through a century of multiple countries' military budgets. Human space programs are lucky to last two presidents; the next president usually doesn't think giving glory to his predecessor is a good use of money.

So for 40 years, NASA has mostly worked with other countries on human spaceflight or built robot explorers that can be launched in 3-4 years before Congress or the president can axe the program. They're less likely to shut down a mission when 99.99% of the money's been spent, and all that's left to do is download data and uplink occasional instructions.

TL:DR; Congress and the White House keep flashing the equivalent of that computer error message, every time NASA gets ready to send humans into space again. Overload. Abort mission.

Unless, you know, American citizens start saying Go. Go. Go. Go. We have some pretty important priorities down here on Earth (which Amazon and Disney and oil companies should be footing the bill for, though they try not to), but I bet the military can cough up the cost of a few fighter jets.

[harrelltut]

卍 I Mentally Amplify & Relay SOULFUL [MARS] Messages II My Magically HIDDEN [MH] Underworld Subterranean of Atlantis [USA = LEMURIA] on Egyptian HARRELLTV® like when I Meditatively + Artistically CREATE [iMAC] Scientific Algorithms of Technologically Unified Ratios from NEPTUNE'S [SATURN'S] UNSEEN Nuclear [SUN] Energies that Electrophysiologically [Spiritually] UPGRADE My Astronomical Black Christ [ABC = OSIRIAN] Memory intEL [MELanin] on Earth [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] 卍

[curiositydotcom]

It's fun to think about how much we achieved with the technology of the 1960s. We landed on the moon thanks to calculations done on paper with a computer woven by hand that had a small fraction of the processing power of the phone in your pocket. So it doesn't seem strange that the images of the moon we had back then were grainy and low quality. Except they weren't. The orbiters that photographed the moon in the 1960s sent back images that were stunningly high-resolution, even by today's standards. It's just that we couldn't access them until recently.

https://ift.tt/2DBNJhr

[sciencespies]

Chandraayan-2: How a Chennai Engineer Spotted Vikram Lander Debris When NASA Couldn't

https://sciencespies.com/news/chandraayan-2-how-a-chennai-engineer-spotted-vikram-lander-debris-when-nasa-couldnt/

Chandraayan-2: How a Chennai Engineer Spotted Vikram Lander Debris When NASA Couldn't

Shanmuga Subramanian, the eagle-eyed citizen space scientist who found Vikram Moon lander said on Tuesday that he took spotting it as a challenge when NASA couldn’t. He said in an email interview to IANS: “It was something challenging as even NASA can’t find out so why can’t we try out? And that’s the thought that led me to search for Vikram lander.”

Subramanian, who works as an information technology architect, in his spare time looked through the images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) camera on September 17 and spotted debris from Vikram.

Those images were taken when the light during moon’s dusk was very harsh at the place where the Moon lander crashed and the long shadows made the hunt for Vikram difficult, NASA and LRO said at that time.

LRO Project Scientist Noah Petro, to whom Subramanian emailed his finding, told IANS: “The story of this really amazing individual (who) found it, helped us find it, is really awesome.”

The Vikram Moon lander was sent by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) aboard the Chandraayan-2 that orbited the Moon.

Vikram was launched from Chandrayaan-2 on September 6 in hopes of making a safe-landing and exploring the Moon’s surface. However, it lost contact with ISRO minutes before the scheduled landing and crashed.

Petro said: “This is the wonderful thing about our data. We released it for the world and anyone can use and he used it to make this discovery.”

Subramanian suggested a crowd-sourced citizen scientist movement to help space organisations.

“LRO’s data is a treasure trove. I would suggest students and others to help out NASA, ISRO and other space organisations by building a good database of LRO images with features like comparison etc.,” Subramanian told IANS.

“Currently we have to compare it manually (and I) wish someone can do more on that, with NASA’s scientists time-crunched for their Moon missions,” he added.

Asked how he got interested, Subramanian said: “Space exploration is nothing new for me as I have been interested in space right from the scratch and watched ISRO’s rocket launches closely even managed to capture some of it on my YouTube channel.

“I don’t think Vikram lander would have made a such impact on the minds of the Indian public if it had landed successfully (but) since it was lost there was a lot of discussion in public forums as well as on my Facebook regarding what malfunctioned etc.

“The crash landing of Vikram made more people interested in it and it also got eventually hooked me, which lead to me searching NASA’s pic for nearly some 4-5 hours every night.”

Subramanian spoke of the social media world of space enthusiasts where intense discussions were taking place about the mystery of Vikram and which helped his quest.

“Initially there was lot of false positives I got (that were) corrected by Twitterati and one of the tweets led to me a Reddit forum where they had the exact intended landing location and the path of Vikram,” he said.

On being able to narrow down the area for his search, he said: “Though there was no data available about the path of Vikram lander, I eventually concluded it would have come from North Pole as one of the tweets from ‘cgbassa’ said Vikram has crossed the North Pole of the Moon. And from ISRO’s live images, I made out it would have stopped short of around 1 km from the landing spot so it eventually led to me searching around 2 sq km around the landing area.”

That tweet was from CG Bassa, an astronomer with Astron, the Dutch radio astronomy institute.

“I searched around North of the landing spot as Vikram approached the landing spot only from the north and though there was lot of false positives, I found a tiny little dot and compared with previous LRO images up to last nine years which eventually confirmed it would be the debris. Then I reached out to NASA.”

Petro said: “He emailed the team, myself and the head of the camera team with his finding and that was used to help identify the location.”

The Arizona State University (ASU), where the LRO camera project work is done, said: “After receiving this tip the LROC team confirmed the identification by comparing before and after images” of the area.

After better pictures came from the LRO’s pass over the area in October and on November 11, when the light conditions improved, the LRO camera team scoured the area surrounding the spot where Subramanian had spotted debris and found the impact spot of Vikram’s crash and other debris, the ASU said.

The impact site is located at 70.8810AoS, 22.7840AoE, at an elevation of 834 metres, it added.

#News

[curiositydotcom]

It's fun to think about how much we achieved with the technology of the 1960s. We landed on the moon thanks to calculations done on paper with a computer woven by hand that had a small fraction of the processing power of the phone in your pocket. So it doesn't seem strange that the images of the moon we had back then were grainy and low quality. Except they weren't. The orbiters that photographed the moon in the 1960s sent back images that were stunningly high-resolution, even by today's standards. It's just that we couldn't access them until recently.

https://ift.tt/2DBNJhr