Game developer's lost electric buggy FOUND ON MOON
A lost, broken-down solar/nuclear robot rover left on the Moon by the Soviet space programme - and nowadays owned by a wealthy computer game developer and space tourist - has been precisely located by NASA's new moon-mapping satellite. NASA LRO imagery showing tracks and final resting place of Lunokhod-2 NASA: Lunar lost …
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Had to look at the banner..
..to make sure I wasn't accidentally reading the Sunday Sport. "Crater Freddie ate my buggy" might have done it.
Incidentally, why isn't the banner green on this day-of-all-days (for the Irish, at least)? Only Google.ie has taken up on it.
Earth months?
Five *earth* months? As opposed to, er, lunar months? Which are, hmmm, months.
Lunar month = 29.53059 days
Five Earth months = 1.03 lunar months. That's 3% difference, man!
With 3% difference in trajectory, they probably wouldn't have fallen into that crater.
Your observation
Is not pedantry, it is accuracy. Choose another icon
Missed something.
Didn't get the Five - to One bit.
Sorry, but I'm retraining to be an Elf And Softy inspecta. Gotta dumb down, else I'll fail the interview, for being overqualified/intelligent/came with my brain.
Practicing being as thick as pigshit will forward my career no end.
Carreer oppertoonitees
"Practicing being as thick as pigshit will forward my career no end."
Isn't that how one gets promoted into management?
Millions
Now he has found it he can fund a private mission to the moon to get it repaired, I'd like to see a private investor do a better job than the space agencies of the world. Get private enterprise into space exploration and zero-g manufacturering and prehaps, maybe, Peter F Hamilton can die a happy man :)
Private enterprise in space
You gotta be kidding me:
The moon's orbit would be a trade secret, the trajectory calculations patented and distributing pictures of the moon could get your internet connection cut off.
And all the parts of your rockets would probably run on different voltages with incompatible plugs.
Need a half-joking icon.
Stop being silly
There wouldn't be such a thing as the moon, it would be carved up and sold off at the earlist opportunity and each individual would need a license to look at the sky ;)
Garriot
Shame he seems to want to buy stuff in space and go into space, rather than keeping his games afloat.
I miss Tabula Rasa :(
Classic stuff
There was that fantastic story on the BBC Planets series.
The Russians sent up a probe and it malfunctioned, they read the telemetry data and it had all gone horribly wrong and they all knew someone would be spending the next 20 year working in a salt-mine in sub-zero temperatures. One scientist yells out "We've landed in something!", to which one of the Soviet Generals standing in the control room shouts back, "Yes, the shit!"!
Did he check the conditions of sale?
Did he purchase the item outright, or just the license to use it on the moon?
If he (or one of his decendents) recovers it and intalls it on another planetry body will he have to pay again?
on a more curious note, in the 2300 great moon clear up?
will he be liaible for the nuclear clean up costs that his old rover will incur as the Chinese Moon Corporation rezones that part of hte moon for residential settlement?
A neat trick...
...seeing as how it was sold to the Greeks, then scrapped 11 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uss_eldridge#Service_history
Apollo 11
Will they be releasing photos of the Apollo 11 landing site?
Re: Apollo 11
Google already covered this on Google Maps...Nevada Desert somewhere
Already done...
This was one of the first things done when LRO went into orbit around the Moon, see;
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html
Trespass!
A while back someone was flogging off real-estate on the moon. Somehow doubt the legality, but Lord British may own the buggy but not the property it's located on.
Oi you!
Get your bloody radioactive buggy off my lawn you hoodie waster! It's making my prize geraniums mutate!
re:Game developer's lost electric buggy FOUND ON MOON
wtf?
HyperRadioProActive amfM Translation .....
"wtf?" ... Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 17th March 2010 14:37 GMT
In a small sentence, the whole essence of Monsieur Bonnet's missive is, AC, ... In the Beginning, was there always Imagination to Create with IT, the Universe and Worlds Full of Plants and Animals Alien to Beings Ignorant in Arrogance?
@ Robert Carnegie
You, sir... etc, etc.
Well done. Anon because I AM, in fact, a coward and wish to remain a living/breathing one.
Re: Selling is forbidden
The comment in question has been picked up and nixed and the user's account zapped. But er, just so you know, you don't get to demand comments are removed. It's up to us. Cheers.
Now that they've got it on camera
and the law was recently changed so they dont have to put the ticket ON the allegedly offending vehicle, he'll get a letter. For no SORN if nothing else.
And for "using a motor vehicle elsewhere than on a road", that's £60.
In a way I'm pleased that the "Bad Astronomy" blog doesn't have this yet
Because if I went -there- and posted, "Sirius B, Dude, Where's My Car", they would sneer. Or politely correct me. I don't know which is worse. Well, I suppose the sneering.
they must be tossers then.
That's hilarious, get's my vote and luckily i've just cleaned my cofffe cup for tomorrow, or it'd have been all over my keyboard.
Bah!
Stupid Russians.
All they had to do was to mount a small fan in front of the radiator so they could blow the dirt off as is accumulated.
I thought all these blokes had ПхДs?
So much for a university education.
Fans move air
Just remind me again how much air there is on the moon?
You seem to be missing a joke icon there
I mean, you can't actually be serious about using a fan on a planetary body (if you count Luna as such) that has no atmosphere for it to blow around?
Moon fan
Just a thought - maybe when "Stevie" suggested putting a fan on the nuke-toting commie kart, maybe he wasn't referring to an "air movement device" but rather an exiled "dissident" with spacesuit and a brush. So that's "fan" in the lunatic sense of the word (someone who really, really likes the Moon).
This is what I've seen referred to as "Chinese engineering" - using cheap manpower to save having to design some fiendish device.
Have you seen?
How much dust accumulates in the fan of your average PC?
Fans attract dust, not dispel it!
To Bite The Duster... Or Not To Bite.
ПХД is impossible without a properly installed прапорщик. They're mostly colonels and generals who were running the moonbuggy, so why surprise there was noone to wipe the surface with a simple duster. + из разработчиков, наверное, в армейке никто не был. So the success of the operation is great (in much, for the Soviet propaganda) and the fail is epic.
Storage Fees
It may be his, but it's been sitting on my property. If he wants it he'll have to pay the storage fees.
Amazing picture
Totally photshopped. We all know that landing on the moon is faked
Return to your cave, troll
Or to your delusions, whichever applies.
Begs the question
How stupidly wealthy (or indeed, wealthy and stupid) do you have to be to buy a robotic rover that's broken. And lost. On another planetary body entirely.
Wonder if he'd be interested in purchasing a Beagle, too?
Oh come now...
...as the evening soirée draws to a close and the gentlemen enjoy a drink and try to out-do each other, I think "I own a 'slightly damanged' nuclear-powered buggy on the moon, no seriously, I got it from the Ruskies at an auction" is going to be a show-stopper. And *now* he can even tell them where it is!
Ah, days gone by...
Lord British and Ultima - that brings me back to my youth!
As a fan of this game series, I know Garriott has not only visited but has also taken possession of his Russian moon rover. It is very obvious to me, as it should also be to anyone else who has played these games.
Garriott stepped into a moongate and emerged on the Moon as Lord British. Duh.
I bet
It's been clamped and it's gonna be towed any day now.
37km?
Anyone know the surface distance travelled/final displacement of the Mars rovers?
In the standard El Reg unit of course.
Mars Rovers
7.8km for Spirit, 19.3km (ongoing) for Opportunity.
It's worth remembering that Lunokhod was not an autonomous vehicle. With the exception of some tilt sensors, it was driven remotely from a control centre in the Crimea - the 2 second delay was just about bearable for its drivers.
One of the purposes of the Lunokhods was to place accurate laser reflectors on the Moon that would be used to measure changes in the distance to the Moon as its orbit continues to spiral outwards. Lunokhod 1's reflector apparently worked for a while but hasn't been seen for a very long time. If anyone is interested, Number 1 lasted 11 months, but only went 10km.
One correction to the original article. The Soviets used Lunar Orbiter photos for navigation and landing site identification, not Apollo.
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