Lagrange Elevator to the Moon - Video

LiftPort Group of Seattle seems to think so. This private company proposes launching rockets from Earth to a 'Lagrange Point PicoGravity Lab' where cargo can be transferred to and from the lunar surface. 

Credit: LiftPort Group

Google X skunk works: Google aiming for the Moon

In a rare public speech, Google Inc. CEO Larry Page once suggested the tech industry needs "safe places where we can try out new things" without rules or interference. 

Some people thought he was describing a futuristic fantasy, perhaps a remote desert island where robots roam free.

But Page already has the next best thing in Google X, the secretive skunk works where company scientists get plenty of resources and free rein to work on things like self-driving cars, Internet-connected balloons and flying power generators.

At a time when other tech companies have trimmed research budgets or focused tightly on their core business, Google's X division is pursuing a range of seemingly outlandish ideas.

While much of it is hush-hush, the X projects that have been announced publicly may push the envelope even further than Google's ventures into ultrafast fiber networks, industrial robotics and high-tech home thermostats.

"They're doing a lot of incredibly weird stuff," said Rob Enderle, analyst at the Enderle Group, "but they're rolling in money." Google made $13 billion profit on $60 billion in sales last year, mostly from online ads.

"That gives them a lot of latitude in what they invest in."

While the X division is housed in two nondescript office buildings near Google's main campus, it's been compared to "Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory" by the man who runs it on a daily basis.

Eric "Astro" Teller, an entrepreneur and scientist who reports to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, once described his staff as "Peter Pans with Ph.D.s."

"They understand that their mission is to think really audaciously, to incubate magic," Teller said in a speech last year, adding that X's goal is to "have an impact on the world and then worry later about making money on it."

The message is classic Page and Brin. Google's co-founders built their powerful Internet search engine as grad students and, as they enter middle age, still espouse a passion for ideas that sound like science fiction.

Consider the driverless cars, often seen near Google's headquarters or zipping up and down Highway 101.

Brin and Page have said they're convinced that cutting-edge sensors and navigational software can eliminate thousands of traffic accidents now caused by human error.

Critics question how that relates to Google's core business, although some analysts believe Google might sell more ads if people spend more time checking email and surfing online in their cars.

Teller describes the mandate for X this way: Identify some really big problems that Google might be able to solve by applying technology in a radically new way.

"There's this open question of what Google is going to be, a decade or more from now," Teller said in an interview.

"Google X isn't the only answer to that question, but it was built as a place to do some of the exploration to find some great new problems for Google to tackle."

As head of X, Teller is known as Google's "captain of moonshots" - a reference to Page's penchant for ambitious projects that promise big impact. Teller, a grandson of pioneering physicist Edward Teller, got the nickname "Astro" from high school friends who thought his spiky haircut looked like artificial turf.

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NASA LADEE transmits its first images of the Moon

Series of LADEE star tracker images features the lunar terrain. Credit: NASA Ames

Earlier this month, NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory successfully downlinked images of the moon and stars taken by onboard camera systems, known as star trackers.

This is the first time the LADEE team commanded the spacecraft to send these pictures back to Earth.

The main job of a star tracker is to snap images of the surrounding star field so that the spacecraft can internally calculate its orientation in space.

It completes this task many times per minute. The accuracy of each of LADEE's instruments' measurements depends on the star tracker calculating the precise orientation of the spacecraft.

Butler Hine

"Star tracker cameras are actually not very good at taking ordinary images," said Butler Hine LADEE project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

"But they can sometimes provide exciting glimpses of the lunar terrain."

Given the critical nature of its assignment, a star tracker doesn't use ordinary cameras.

Star trackers' lenses have a wide-angle field of view to capture the night sky in a single frame.

The images shown here were acquired on Feb. 8, 2014, around 23:45 UTC, while LADEE was carrying out atmospheric measurements.

The series of five images were taken at one-minute intervals, and caught features in the northern western hemisphere of the moon.

LADEE was traveling approximately 60 miles (100 km) per minute along its orbit.

All images were taken during lunar night, but with Earthshine illuminating the surface.

The initial image captured the smooth-floored crater Krieger, about 14 miles (23 km) in diameter, on the horizon, with four mile (seven km) wide Toscanelli, in the foreground.

The second image shows Wollaston P, about two-and-a-half miles (4 km) diameter, near the horizon, and the southeastern flank of the lunar mountain Mons Herodotus.

The third image caught a minor lunar mountain range, Montes Agricola, which is northwest of the large bright crater Aristarchus (out of view), as well as the flat-floored crater Raman, about six miles (10 km) diameter.

Image four in the series captures Golgi, about four miles (6 km) in diameter, and three-mile-wide (5 km) Zinner.

The final image views craters Lichtenberg A and Schiaparelli E in the smooth mare basalt plains of Western Oceanus Procellarum, west of the Aristarchus plateau.

The star trackers will operate while LADEE continues to measure the chemical composition of the atmosphere, collect and analyze samples of lunar dust particles in the atmosphere and hope to address a long-standing question: Was lunar dust, electrically charged by sunlight, responsible for the pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon observed during several Apollo missions? And who knows?

The LADEE star trackers may help answer that question.

GRAIL mission puts a new face on the moon

This graphic depicting the crustal thickness of the moon was generated using gravity data from NASA's GRAIL mission and topography data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ IPGP

Scientists using data from the lunar-orbiting twins of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission are gaining new insight into how the face of the moon received its rugged good looks.

A report on the asymmetric distribution of lunar impact basins is published in this week's edition of the journal Science.

Maria Zuber

"Since time immemorial, humanity has looked up and wondered what made the man in the moon," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

"We know the dark splotches are large, lava-filled, impact basins that were created by asteroid impacts about four billion years ago. GRAIL data indicate that both the near side and the far side of the moon were bombarded by similarly large impactors, but they reacted to them much differently."

Understanding lunar impact basins has been hampered by the simple fact that there is a lack of consensus on their size.

Most of the largest impact basins on the near side of the moon (the moon's face) have been filled with lava flows, which hide important clues about the shape of the land that could be used for determining their dimensions.

The GRAIL mission measured the internal structure of the moon in unprecedented detail for nine months in 2012. With the data, GRAIL scientists have redefined the sizes of massive impact basins on the moon.

Maps of crustal thickness generated by GRAIL revealed more large impact basins on the near-side hemisphere of the moon than on the far side.

How could this be if both hemispheres were, as widely believed, on the receiving end of the same number of impacts?

Scientists have long known that the temperatures of the near-side hemisphere of the moon were higher than those on the far side: the abundances of the heat producing elements uranium and thorium are higher on the near side than the far side, and as a consequence, the vast majority of volcanic eruptions occurred on the moon's near-side hemisphere.

Using a precision formation-flying technique, the twin GRAIL spacecraft mapped the moon's gravity field, as depicted in this artist's rendering. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

"Impact simulations indicate that impacts into a hot, thin crust representative of the early moon's near-side hemisphere would have produced basins with as much as twice the diameter as similar impacts into cooler crust, which is indicative of early conditions on the moon's far-side hemisphere," notes lead author Katarina Miljkovic of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.

NASA JPL: GRAIL's Gravity Map of the Moon

This image shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) during the primary mapping mission from March to May 2012. 

Very precise microwave measurements between two spacecraft, named Ebb and Flow, were used to map gravity with high precision and high spatial resolution. 

The field shown resolves blocks on the surface of about 12 miles (20 kilometers) and measurements are three to five times improved over previous data. Red corresponds to mass excesses and blue corresponds to mass deficiencies. 

The map shows more small-scale detail on the far side of the moon compared to the nearside because the far side has many more small craters.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT/GSFC

The Moon, Galileo, 8 December 1992 Vintage - Bloomsbury Auctions

The Moon, Galileo, 8 December 1992 Vintage false colour, chromogenic print.

Credit: Bloomsbury Auctions

NASA LRO Finds Further Evidence of Water On The Moon

Scientists from NASA and Boston University have found small patches of ice in the Shackleton Crater, at the south pole of the Moon.

Five to 10 percent of the crater wall is made of ice, they said, after analyzing data obtained from the Mini-RF radar on Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"These terrific results from the Mini-RF team contribute to the evolving story of water on the moon. Several of the instruments on LRO have made unique contributions to this story, but only the radar penetrates beneath the surface to look for signatures of blocky ice deposits," said John Keller, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Scientists believe that because the interior of the Shackleton crater lies in permanent shadow it is cold enough for ice to accumulate.

"Inside the crater, we don't see evidence for glaciers like on earth. Glacial ice has a whopping radar signal, and these measurements reveal a much weaker signal consistent with rugged terrain and limited ice," said Bradley Thomson, researcher at Boston University.

The Moon: The Future for Circumlunar flights and landings

Circumlunar flight can be more than just a test run. It can also be scientifically useful. The crew of Apollo 13 still managed to take useful photography of the lunar surface as they flew past, despite their circumstances.

A circumlunar mission presents the opportunities for observing the Moon, the Earth, and exploring the properties of deep space itself.

Return to the Moon
Much attention has been focused on plans by various nations to return astronauts to the Moon. At the moment, it doesn't seem that anyone will be landing there for at least another decade. America is revising its original plans for the Orion program, which calls for a return to lunar orbital missions and landings.

Some alternatives would see astronauts orbiting the Moon without landing, and also visiting asteroids.

Circumlunar Missions

There's one mission plan that's been discussed a lot in the past, but doesn't seem too popular right now. Circumlunar missions are a way of moving quickly beyond Earth orbit and reaching a target in space, without as much of the complexity of a landing or even entering lunar orbit.

Put simply, a circumlunar mission would send a spacecraft flying to the Moon, where it would pass around the Moon's far side, using the Moon's gravity to slingshot it back to Earth. A mission like this takes roughly six days to accomplish.

The Zond Program
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union introduced the Zond program, which was the world's first attempt at a manned circumlunar mission. Zond was a modified version of the Soyuz spacecraft, used to launch cosmonauts to Earth orbit. It would be launched to the Moon atop a Proton rocket, more powerful than the booster normally used to launch Soyuz.

Zond test missions were flown to the Moon and back with animals on board, but the missions were not entirely successful. The program was cancelled as America's Apollo program gained ground by sending astronauts to orbit the Moon, without a single cosmonaut flying a mission.

In 1970, the first manned circumlunar mission was flown, although the crew originally had no plans to make such a trip! Apollo 13 was intended to make America's third manned lunar landing.

Halfway to the Moon, the spacecraft experienced an explosion that crippled the Service Module and placed the survival of the astronauts in jeopardy. The crew was rescued by flying a circumlunar trajectory that used the Moon's gravity to help them return to Earth.

Today, circumlunar missions with Soyuz spacecraft have been proposed by at least one space tourism group. It is unclear when, or if, they will fly.

Circumlunar missions could be too expensive and complex for space tourism at the moment. But this shouldn't stop government space programs and aerospace companies from drawing plans.

A circumlunar mission could be a partial step towards a lunar orbital mission or a flight into deeper space. As the rescue of Apollo 13 demonstrated, the mission architecture has advantages of safety that aren't found in lunar orbital missions. This could take some of the risks out of testing new hardware in deep space.

Circumlunar flight can be more than just a test run. It can also be scientifically useful. The crew of Apollo 13 still managed to take useful photography of the lunar surface as they flew past, despite their circumstances. A circumlunar mission presents the opportunities for observing the Moon, the Earth, and exploring the properties of deep space itself.