No Moon Rovers?

Hey,

I've just thought about this:

We have two rovers on Mars right? Spirit and Opportunity.

As far as I know there are no rovers on the moon!!! Why not?!!!

Is it not easier to send rovers to the moon than to Mars?

Would rovers on the moon reveal too much or 'upset' some inhabitants?

We know nearly everything about our Moon, sending a rover would be a waste. We know more about our damn moon than we know our oceans.

There are no inhabitants on the moon, we have searched and searched and searched and we found nothing.

You know, I feel stupid, I never really thought about that.

Seems like a good place to test landing, easily retrievable hardware. They could test different robotic platforms, maybe make a robot splunker and go take a look inside those holes recently confirmed by NASA to exist.

We should make some kind of petition, see if we could force upon NASA or other agencies to send robots to poke around the moon

There were these:

Lunokhod 1
Lunokhod 2

and china is planning to send one within 10 years:

China Develops Rover for Mission to Moon

...but, yes -- I agree that the U.S. should consider sending their own rovers.

However, that would be in a perfect world where NASA has a large budget. I understand that NASA's budget is extremely limited, and there are more exciting scientific missions that they need to concentrate their money on, such as Mars missions and future missions to Titan, Europa, and/or Enceladus.
I would take one Titan or Enceledus mission over ten Moon rover missions.

[edit on 8/6/2010 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by Mythic Chris
There are no inhabitants on the moon, we have searched and searched and searched and we found nothing.

thats not true. We have not searched and searched and searched. They sent only a few missions to the surface. and Im sorry but orbiting satalites taking pictures of the surface is NOT searching.

[edit on 6-8-2010 by Le Colonel]

[edit on 6-8-2010 by Le Colonel]

As Soylent mentioned, there were successful Soviet rover missions to Moon about 40 years ago. Doing mostly same all over again is a hard thing to sell to the public and funding agencies.

It would be interesting to experiment with He3 extraction by robots, however the thermonuclear energy has not taken its place here on Earth yet, so hard to justify.

Originally posted by chemistry
As far as I know there are no rovers on the moon!!! Why not?!!!

We don't have much of an active lunar program at the moment, and when we did, we didn't have the technology to create a rover with enough artificial intelligence to avoid crashing into rocks or falling into a crater.

Probably, eventually, we'll have more rovers poking around on the Moon. I personally would like to see a herd of rovers find a nice parabolic crater on the lunar far side and work like little spiders to build a good radio telescope there. I think that's doable with our current technology.

But, for the moment, large lunar programs are just not worth the money spent on them.

We know very little about the Moon.
Considering how far Mars is, there`s some brilliant close up Colour photos of its surface.
We`ve landed on the Moon and all we seem to get are Grey photos of craters and dust.
There are un-manned vehicles that go to the Space station.
Can`t they fly a few of them around the Moon and give us some good pictures?
We have not searched and searched. If we had, we should have more information than we do.
Strange innit?

We do have rovers on the moon. They were manned rovers. We used rovers on three different lunar missions, Apollo 15,16 and17.

They are still there.




[edit on 6-8-2010 by butcherguy]

reply to post by lambros56


Yeah..WE don't know much about the moon, but you can bet THEY know plenty.

The moon is littered with artifacts, just as is most of the rest of the solar system.

It took the creep over 40 years to tell us definitively there was water on the moon, maybe in 400 or 500 years, they may condescend to telling us about the ruins there too!

Originally posted by lambros56
We`ve landed on the Moon and all we seem to get are Grey photos of craters and dust.

I think you have been looking in several wrong places, we have hundreds of colour photos taken on the surface and more from orbit.

There are un-manned vehicles that go to the Space station.
Can`t they fly a few of them around the Moon and give us some good pictures?

No, in the same way that a ferryboat cannot cross the Atlantic.

Just to clarify, I am talking about remotely controlled robotic rovers.

We have all kinds of wonderful and fancy equipment on the Mars rovers.

Wouldn't it be great if we could send this same technology to the moon?

However, I still think we are focussing on the surface of the moon too
much

[edit on 6-8-2010 by chemistry]

reply to post by chemistry


Although the company that made the Mars Rovers' drill makes automated drill systems I think that it's still to early for a real exploration below the surface, even on Earth that's much more difficult, so I guess we will be limited to the surface for a long time.

Originally posted by ArMaP

Originally posted by lambros56
We`ve landed on the Moon and all we seem to get are Grey photos of craters and dust.

I think you have been looking in several wrong places, we have hundreds of colour photos taken on the surface and more from orbit.

There are un-manned vehicles that go to the Space station.
Can`t they fly a few of them around the Moon and give us some good pictures?

No, in the same way that a ferryboat cannot cross the Atlantic.

As ArMap pointed out, the astronauts took hundreds of color photos of the Moon.

I would like to add that we also have sent many orbital missions to the Moon to take photographs, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which is still there right now taking Hi-Res images. There was also the Clementine orbiter, the Lunar Prospector (which didn't have a hi-res camera, but was packed with many other instruments that collected valuable scientific data), the Chinese Chang'e 1, India's Chanrayaan 1, Japan's Selene, plus many Russian probes over the years.

As ArMap said about sending one of the Space Station unmanned supply craft: "No, in the same way that a ferryboat cannot cross the Atlantic", ...but even if it could, these specially-designed orbiters we have already sent (and more we are planning to send) did much more science than a re-used unmanned Space Station supply ship could do.



[edit on 8/6/2010 by Soylent Green Is People]

I have a hard time believing aliens warned humanity away from the moon and that's why we haven't been there in a long time...but there really must be a more logical explanation. It would be cool if there were rovers there now equivalent to the ones on Mars, I guess the most plausible explanation is funding problems. But even so, you'd think they'd find a way since we're now what 40ish years since a human has set foot on the lunar surface? If they don't want to send a person, fine, but at least send a robot to poke around up there some more.

reply to post by IamMe14


It's too expensive and the people that could give the money are more interested in faster and surer ways of getting their investments back.

Without a nation's honour at stake, commercialism rules, and there's no market for Moon exploration right now. Even Mars exploration, apparently, is much less interesting (to those that give the money) than it was some five years ago, unfortunately.

There are no plans for sending a robotic rover to the Moon at this time by NASA. I've always wished they would send some, but Mars missions tend to be more desirable..

However, India and Russia are planning to send a rover and lander to the Moon.

Chandrayaan-2
luna glob

Originally posted by Mythic Chris
We know nearly everything about our Moon...

Quite the opposite, we know only a little about our Moon. With only 6 manned landings and a handful of robotic missions, we've only just begun to scratch the surface.

Originally posted by Mythic Chris
We know nearly everything about our Moon, sending a rover would be a waste. We know more about our damn moon than we know our oceans.

There are no inhabitants on the moon, we have searched and searched and searched and we found nothing.

If we take Chemistry's thinking there's probably more intelligent life on the moon than in his house.