[Subjectivist]

http://www.watoday.com.au/technology/sc ... 33dyj.html

A Spanish astronomer says he witnessed a fridge-sized asteroid smash into the moon, in the biggest lunar impact by a space rock ever recorded.
The rare episode was seen by Jose Maria Madiedo, a professor at the University of Huelva, Britain's Royal Astronomical Society said.
On September 11 last year, Madiedo was operating two lunar-observing telescopes when he spotted a flash in the Mare Nubium, an ancient, dark lava-filled basin.
The flare, which occurred at 8.07pm GMT, was briefly almost as bright as the northern hemisphere's Pole Star, the society said.
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It would have been visible to the naked eye to anyone who happened to be looking at the noon at that moment in good viewing conditions.
There followed a long afterglow, lasting another eight seconds – the longest and brightest ever seen for a lunar impact.
"At that moment, I realised that I had seen a very rare and extraordinary event," Madiedo told the society.
Madiedo and colleagues calculate the rock had a mass of about 400 kilograms with a diameter of between 60 and 140 centimetres.
It hit Mare Nubium – a large, flat area in the Nubium basin on the moon's near side – at about 61,000 km/h. Madiedo has posted two clips on YouTube (here and here).
The speed was so high that the rock turned molten on impact and vaporised, leaving a thermal glow visible from Earth as a flash, and bequeathing a 40-metre crater in the moon's pocked surface.
The impact energy was equivalent to an explosion of about 15 tonnes of TNT, more than triple the largest previously seen event, claimed by NASA in March 2013.
Madiedo's team calculate that rocks of this size may strike Earth about 10 times more frequently than was generally thought.
Earth, though, is protected by its atmosphere and asteroids of this size burn up as dramatic "fireball" meteors.
By way of comparison, the rock that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013, is believed to have measured about 20 metres across and weighed 13,000 tonnes. It is considered to have been at the lower end of medium-sized asteroids.
The Spanish observation is published in the RAS journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-te ... z2uXQ2SjJY

Imagine the reaction if this fridge sized object had hit a city anywhere on Earth?

[Sixstrings]

Exclusive - The FAA: regulating business on the moon

(Reuters) - The United States government has taken a new, though preliminary, step to encourage commercial development of the moon.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, U.S. companies can stake claims to lunar territory through an existing licensing process for space launches.

The Federal Aviation Administration, in a previously undisclosed late-December letter to Bigelow Aerospace, said the agency intends to “leverage the FAA’s existing launch licensing authority to encourage private sector investments in space systems by ensuring that commercial activities can be conducted on a non-interference basis.”

In other words, experts said, Bigelow could set up one of its proposed inflatable habitats on the moon, and expect to have exclusive rights to that territory - as well as related areas that might be tapped for mining, exploration and other activities.

However, the FAA letter noted a concern flagged by the U.S. State Department that “the national regulatory framework, in its present form, is ill-equipped to enable the U.S. government to fulfill its obligations” under a 1967 United Nations treaty, which, in part, governs activities on the moon.

The United Nations Outer Space treaty, in part, requires countries to authorize and supervise activities of non-government entities that are operating in space, including the moon. It also bans nuclear weapons in space, prohibits national claims to celestial bodies and stipulates that space exploration and development should benefit all countries.

“We didn’t give (Bigelow Aerospace) a license to land on the moon. We’re talking about a payload review that would potentially be part of a future launch license request. But it served a purpose of documenting a serious proposal for a U.S. company to engage in this activity that has high-level policy implications,” said the FAA letter’s author, George Nield, associate administrator for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Transportation.

“We recognize the private sector’s need to protect its assets and personnel on the moon or on other celestial bodies," the FAA wrote in the December letter to Bigelow Aerospace. The company, based in Nevada, is developing the inflatable space habitats. Bigelow requested the policy statement from the FAA, which oversees commercial space transportation in the U.S.

The letter was coordinated with U.S. departments of State, Defense, Commerce, as well as NASA and other agencies involved in space operations. It expands the FAA’s scope from launch licensing to U.S. companies’ planned activities on the moon, a region currently governed only by the nearly 50-year old UN space treaty.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/03/us-usa-moon-business-idUSKBN0L715F20150203

Well this is interesting. Companies are starting to show interest in lunar operations. But they need some kind of "licensing" protection to secure their claims on the moon. So the FAA is going to do that, but then the State Dept said hey what about that old treaty about the moon, lol.

At the end of the day.. the moon is a very big and very empty place, and treaty or not, those that get there first and start working the "land" should have some protection rights for their operations.

[careinke]

Hubris

[SeaGypsy]

That's why the whole idea is a fail. The moon landings were faked anyhow & getting in anything going out on a rocket is Russian roulette. So what you will get for a crew is people who believe fairy stories & enjoy extreme risky activity, & it will definitely have to be government funded.

Sent from my HUAWEI Y320-U151 using Tapatalk

[AgentR11]

That's why the whole idea is a fail. The moon landings were faked anyhow & getting in anything going out on a rocket is Russian roulette. So what you will get for a crew is people who believe fairy stories & enjoy extreme risky activity, & it will definitely have to be government funded.

I don't see why the moon landings would need to be faked. "Go and come back" for the moon is well within our technological abilities. Its kinda a waste of money, but at the time it was more a defense expenditure than an exploration item; and we build lots of defense stuff that we hope won't ever see real use.

Just think of what it would mean if F22's HAD to be scrambled inside the continental US... We spend billions for those things and their maintenance; and the best retirement story the F22 could ever have in the future was that its most urgent mission was to bomb some idgits in Syria, cause reasons.

Apollo program same deal. We got some rocks, and proved our missile and guidance tech for everyone that needed it proven to them at the time.

So to a certain extent, it doesn't even matter if modern folks believe the landings happened or not. If we really go moon or mars with massively heavy humans and their pesky water requirements, I can't imagine we'd use the Apollo template. Spend tens or hundreds of billions of new dollars to do something you did 50-100 years ago, the same way you did it back then?? Not rational. Though granted, humans outside LEO isn't particularly rational to begin with...

nb... the sentence in my first post that mentions Earth's gravity well as a delimiter is messed up; I got two thoughts mixed in together. re heading out for mars, vs prior mission to moon. Obviously The Moon, Earth's moon, is within Earth's gravity well! lol.

[SeaGypsy]

I have done my homework & you can count me as one of the 20% of yanks who don't buy it. No point arguing about it really.

Sent from my HUAWEI Y320-U151 using Tapatalk

[dissident]

Lots of NASA photos are clear fakes:



In the above photograph there is no indication at all of any radial dust dispersion from the lander engine. All attempts to excuse this obvious fake are nonsense. You can see the footprints in the dust and there is at least one inch of it. Even a weak exhaust stream from the rocket engine would have produced a pattern in the dust. You don't need some blast crater.

But my tinfoil hat theory is that NASA failed to obtain studio quality photographs during the missions and some genius decided to stage them anyway. So there were actual moon landings. Attempts to paint them as some sort of supernatural-like achievement are inane. They were technically feasible with 1960s technology.

But the astronauts on these missions were very, very lucky. If they were in transit during a CME, then they would have been heavily irradiated. The quarter inch aluminum skin of the lunar craft was not thick enough to stop high energy electron radiation (aka beta radiation). It wouldn't even stop the higher energy end of the proton spectrum either.

[Keith_McClary]

In the above photograph there is no indication at all of any radial dust dispersion from the lander engine. All attempts to excuse this obvious fake are nonsense. You can see the footprints in the dust and there is at least one inch of it. Even a weak exhaust stream from the rocket engine would have produced a pattern in the dust. You don't need some blast crater.

We need a Moondust thread:
PROOF WE LANDED ON THE MOON IS IN THE DUST

Turning this visual data in to formulas allowed Hsu and Horányi to plot the movement of dust on a graph, turning the Grand Prix’s rooster tails into a mathematical visualization.
...
Hsu and Horányi’s results, specifically the lack of particles' deceleration along the x-axis of their coordinate system, could only be the case if Apollo 16’s rover footage was filmed in a vacuum. A vacuum like you'd find on the lunar surface, for example, which couldn't exist on a sound stage on Earth.

[dissident]

In the above photograph there is no indication at all of any radial dust dispersion from the lander engine. All attempts to excuse this obvious fake are nonsense. You can see the footprints in the dust and there is at least one inch of it. Even a weak exhaust stream from the rocket engine would have produced a pattern in the dust. You don't need some blast crater.

We need a Moondust thread:
PROOF WE LANDED ON THE MOON IS IN THE DUST

Turning this visual data in to formulas allowed Hsu and Horányi to plot the movement of dust on a graph, turning the Grand Prix’s rooster tails into a mathematical visualization.
...
Hsu and Horányi’s results, specifically the lack of particles' deceleration along the x-axis of their coordinate system, could only be the case if Apollo 16’s rover footage was filmed in a vacuum. A vacuum like you'd find on the lunar surface, for example, which couldn't exist on a sound stage on Earth.

Totally irrelevant to the photograph that I posted. The lander had a rocket engine at its base which spewed a significant flux of mass which would displace the surface dust layer. The dust ejection by the moon buggy wheels has basically next to nothing to do with the physics of rocket exhaust contacting a dust layer in a vacuum. The exhaust from a rocket nozzle in a vacuum does not need to fight atmospheric resistance and would hit the surface of the moon with little loss of kinetic energy. It is a physical contradiction to claim that the moon lander thrust was "too small" it was enough to slow it down to a low g impact on the surface on a celestial body with 1/6th the Earth's gravity. One sixth of the same thrust on Earth is not negligible. It is damned significant.

Debunking one claim does not debunk all claims. This sort of "thinking" is political and emotional and not rational.

[AgentR11]

Not that I believe the conspiracy theories; but NASA does in fact have a vacuum space, in Houston, large enough to do those photographs. Myself, I think the photo's look fine, as is. They neither prove, nor disprove anything, but do serve to show the relative scale and colors of objects used in the landing.

[Strummer]

http://space.stackexchange.com/question ... ok-like-it

You can clearly see the dust blown away in the trajectory of the lander in the photos.

[ralfy]

Probably shared before: "moon hoax not"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU

[Outcast_Searcher]

The moon landings were faked anyhow

So how do you explain the repeatable Lunar Lasar Ranging experiment, using the retroflector arrays placed on the moon by Apollo 11, 14, and 15?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Las ... experiment

Is this all a fake too?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmVxSFnjYCA

[Tanada]

Several companies from all over the world are on board with the idea of a Moon village, the director-general of the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday (18 January).

Johann-Dietrich Woerner told a press conference in Paris that there was “a list of worldwide entities” interested in activities on the Moon, which he has been advocating since becoming ESA's head in 2015.

“For me, the Moon village is already more or less a fact,” said Woerner.

“Okay, there is nothing on the Moon visible [yet], but there will be something visible very soon, because several of these entities are planning to go to the Moon rather soon, and they are saying: 'We would like to be part of this overall concept',” he said.

Woerner did not directly answer EUobserver's question, sent in via Twitter, whether ESA member states have committed funding for a permanent base on the far side of the Moon.

But he noted that the Moon village is “a concept ... something which is an idea, which is not one single project.”

The Moon village, in Woerner's idea, would succeed the International Space Station (ISS), after 2024. But unlike the ISS, private companies would also be able to access the Moon base.

In an interview with EUobserver last year, Woerner said people should not think the Moon village would be like a classical Earth village with churches and houses.




“The word Moon village should mean that we are putting together the capabilities of different actors, be it private companies or public,” he said.

On Wednesday, he reiterated that stance.

“It's not like the International Space Station, which is more or less restricted to the club. The Moon village idea is an open idea, free and open access,” said Woerner.

Although he did not drop names, he said companies have approached ESA offering to provide shuttle services to and from the Moon, and firms that want to set up mining operations.

Space activities were traditionally in the hands of nation states, but due to technological progress it has become easier for private companies to get involved.

Several teams are competing for a prize funded by technology giant Google to land the first privately-owned device on the Moon.

The competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize are trying to be the first to land a spacecraft on the Moon's surface; let it travel for 500 metres; and send back images and video back to Earth.

The winner has been promised $20 million (€18.7 million).

https://euobserver.com/science/136590

[aldente]

Hey Big Tex, you look like Alex Haley - the Scottish performer !
just a compliment..

[KaiserJeep]

Do we have to have a thread about mooning?

[dolanbaker]

Well they'd better hurry up and get working on it soon, as the number of surviving humans who have actually been to the moon is diminishing and it won't be too many years before we get to the point of having no living person who has been there.

Personally, I think going back is a complete waste of time and energy.

[sparky]

.
Yep , the Moon , been there done that !
beside playing some cosmic athletics there is no reason whatsoever of going there.
sending a fleet of cheap automated drones toward the neighborhood would be more productive

[ROCKMAN]

Donlan - I'm with you: someone wants to pay the freight they couild start packing. Personally I would prefer Costa Rica...much better coffee then the sludge NASA makes.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Well they'd better hurry up and get working on it soon, as the number of surviving humans who have actually been to the moon is diminishing and it won't be too many years before we get to the point of having no living person who has been there.

Personally, I think going back is a complete waste of time and energy.

Yeah, I don't get it.

With all the incredible telescope technology we have, and various telescopic missions, it's not like we can't (continue to) learn a tremendous amount without shipping humans to live in very dangerous places with little to gain -- especially someplace we've been several times and studied quite a bit.

And, if we DO find something that seems incredibly important to investigate closely, we have mighty good probe technology now (example, probe missions to comets and asteroids, plus the mars rovers). If we find something that seems to demand humans closely examine it, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. It's very expensive and quite dangerous, so we shouldn't be doing that stuff just so we can say we did it.

Oh, and we have plenty of serious and complex problems to solve right here on earth, and finite resources and funding to pay for them.