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 …
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 :)
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
...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!
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.
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.
I quote NASA:
The Soviets later revealed that during a conference on planetary exploration in Moscow, 29 January to 2 February 1973 (that is, after the landing of Luna 21), an American scientist had given photos of the lunar surface around the Luna 21 landing site to a Soviet engineer in charge of the Lunokhod 2 mission. These photos, taken prior to the Apollo 17 landing, were later used by the "driver team" to navigate the new rover on its mission on the Moon.
It will be a bit disturbing if the radiator turns out to be clogged with Clangers, Froglets or bits of Soup Dragon. I mean, there's like a three-second lag between seeing and avoiding with an Earth-Moon telepresence set-up. It must've been like trying to play Mariocart Wii over a dial-up line.
The New Scientist ran a story a couple of weeks ago suggesting that earlier reports of Spirit's death may be exaggerated. Nasa got it moving again and it may yet come out of hibernation in October and trundle on.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18596-mars-rover-spirit-could-rise-again.html
Did the Reg run the story? I can't find it in the Space section, and I do like to get all my non-terrestrial motor vehicle news in the same place, so what gives?
Obviously the radiator isn't clogged with dust, that would be too easy. In the ensuing struggle and wheel-spinning effort to dig itself out of the crater, those sharp wheels did the only thing they were originally designed for, before being pressed into lunar service as tires:
They grated the cheese and covered the heater in that. Once it melted into a mozzarella-thick coating, there was only one thing left to do - Find some pepperoni!
Mine's the one with the wedge of Lunar-Brie in the pocket.
Will we finally be able to see that people really went to the moon and the bits and bobs Apollo missions left behind?
Of course, if NASA could fake the moon landing videos presumably they can fake some photos of the site from orbit.
I can just about believe we made it, I can't believe we've never been back.
"Grr" to space exploration policies.
Around the time of the Lonokhod mission, the UK telly news was also full of the Icelandic Cod War. So in my tiny eight-year-old brain I began to believe that while the Icelanders were trying to chase our trawlers away, the Soviets had found fish on the moon. What can I say, I had only recently disentangled Houston (we have a problem) from Euston (where the night sleeper to Glasgow goes from).
It never ceases to amaze me how The Russians had such a lack of resources and technological edges and still got by pretty well. It's a bit like looking at the demo scene where people are still doing amazing things on commodores 64. Yes, there's fancier stuff around, but knowing the hardware it's quite amazing what people can make it do. In that respect, most of our current hardware and software doesn't do half it could do. Which just goes to show how we don't get to go to the moon now and The Russians did, thirty years ago.
I just took that comment from the NASA site, which is filled with some of the funniest things I've ever read (well, maybe not ever, but they still make me feel a little smarter).
If you're bored enough to slog through all of them, it's worth it: http://comments-submit.nasa.gov/commenting1/Comment.do?uiAction=listComments&location=http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html&siteID=245441819
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