Originally posted by Komodo

blah, blah, blah....yet we still get )#*& black & white pictures and Hubble can't look at the moon to really see the landing craft that s/b still there..

try again plz.....

Yes, Hubble can look at the Moon, but track it's motion, no. The apparent motion of distant objects (hundreds, thousands of lightyears away etc) are easy to track. Imaging the Moon with Hubble would give you a nice grey streak of nothing.

As for crap B&W photos. Well, on a mission such as LRO's, weight, space, bandwidth, time, power etc, are at a premium. You can't afford (not just financially) to carry flashy high res colour cameras. Other instruments take priority. Imagine having to downlink tens of gigabytes of images. First you have to store the data, then its in a long queue with the rest of the other instrument data. Where are you going to get the required power from to transmit it all? Pretty pictures may be what Joe Public wants to see, but they are not much use to the scientific community. The pictures of the Apollo sites are merely a byproduct of the LRO mission.

S

One thing about the moon landing that always amazed me was how they managed to fit a dune buggy on board, get it going and drive around the moon. Surely if you made this vehicle, you would let the world know, you made the car that runs in space. (think boeing made it)

Originally posted by brew8537
One thing about the moon landing that always amazed me was how they managed to fit a dune buggy on board, get it going and drive around the moon. Surely if you made this vehicle, you would let the world know, you made the car that runs in space...

There was empty wedge-shaped space on the Lunar module that was 5' high x 5' wide x 5' deep (shaped like a tall piece of pie). Amazingly, the Rover was designed to be able to fit into that existing space in the rover's "folded" position, and be able to be deployed/assembled by astronauts in 45 minutes.

The deployment instructions begin on page 97 of the pdf that phage linked.

...(think boeing made it)

It was a joint contract. General Motors designed the concept (including the rover's "foldablity" for stowage purposes, and its "spring action" deployment) and Boeing produced the working vehicle.


[edit on 11/2/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]