Starship Asterisk*

It's dirt, I tell you. 8) I actually once ate green cheese and didn't like it; its consistency was nothing like dirt.

I recalled reading lunar rover designs in Popular Science magazine throughout the 1960s while the pros were designing the one they eventually used. I went looking for any reference to some of those old designs, and instead I found a prize competition for current designs (but unmanned, I think).

According to http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-02/lunar-x-prize-competitors-announced ...

"a team must land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, rove at least 500 meters, and beam a particular set of video, pictures and data back to earth"

According to http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/008moonprize.html and http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/009prizewinner.html ...

the idea is flawed and borrowed.

[quote="NoelC"]I wonder if one added water (e.g., mined from underground or in the base of polar craters) whether it might harden and make a decent building material.[/quote]
Nope. The lunar regolith is an abrasive dust which is mainly basaltic, with many grains partly coated in glass. It might make a good component of some type of concrete, but you'd still need a binding agent. If you added water, you'd get mud, and there would be little in the way of reactions. The water would simply evaporate, giving you dust again.

It does look like cement, but that appearance is superficial. It has also been compared to flour. Keep in mind that most of what you see is blacker than fresh asphalt; part of the illusion is that the surface appears quite light in photos, because of the choice of exposure parameters.

Thanks for posting those images.

I finally figured out what the dust on the Lunar surface reminds me of: Dry cement.

I wonder if one added water (e.g., mined from underground or in the base of polar craters) whether it might harden and make a decent building material.

-Noel

I agree a non-stereo version linked directly to in the caption would be much appreciated, but I'm not sure this is always easy to do if the author only sends the editors finished image.

However, the first link is to an Apollo images gallery, with a lot of great pictures, including from Apollo 17. It might be in there somewhere. Here's two more great pictures I did find in the gallery. As I understand, it lashed down to the outside of the Lunar module in the form of the first picture, and the astronauts lowered it to the ground with a winch, then simply unfolded it and connected the batteries and antennae.

[img]http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/ap17-KSC-72P-202.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-134-20421.jpg[/img]

[quote="Sjoerd"]Now where on the topic. Do you think it might be possible to make a 3D image of our milkyway by making one foto in june and one foto in december of the same patch of sky and then superimposing them? Maybe a foto of Proxima century, because you have the best chance of it standing out from the background?[/quote]
No, everything is just too far away compared to the size of Earth's orbit. Even Proxima Centauri is too far; the ratio of its distance to Earth's orbital diameter is the same as 6 miles to your eye separation. And you sure don't get any sense of stereo vision for objects 6 miles away.

I also Love 3D images and the crossing the eye method will do fine. I also have 3D glasses but viewing a monitor never really works. The colours don't quite cancle each other out.
Also Have you noticed that the ofset looks wrong? The two images (in the coloured glasses version) seem to be above and below eachother in stead of being side by side (you can see it clearly where the wheels meet the ground.)

Now where on the topic. Do you think it might be possible to make a 3D image of our milkyway by making one foto in june and one foto in december of the same patch of sky and then superimposing them? Maybe a foto of Proxima century, because you have the best chance of it standing out from the background?

As has been pointed out to me, it is not within my purview to suggest to the good folks at APOD how to run their web site. However, ...

[i]I think it would be a popular improvement to offer a non-3D image alternative when a 3D image is featured.[/i]

I actually have red-blue glasses, but I'm prone not to store them near the computer - my shortcoming, I admit, but surely many others are not "fortunate" (or "retro") enough to have them at all.

Thanks for the converted pictures, NoelC.

And it's nice to see among all the exotic worlds of the solar system that the moon, like Earth and Mars, is made out of good old dirt.

And since it's a new word to [i]me[/i] ...

an-a-glyph (an'uh glif) n.
1. an ornament sculptured or embossed in low
relief.
[1645-55; < Gk anáglyphos wrought in low relief.
See ANA -, GLYPH]

anaglyph (plural anaglyphs)
1. A decorative ornament worked in low relief.
2. The three-dimensional effect created by spectacles that have usually one red and one bluish-green lens and a stereoscopically modified film.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080706.html

I love 3D images. Unfortunately, I do not own a pair of red/blue glasses.

For those of you who might prefer crossing your eyes to superimpose two images taken at slightly different angles instead of using colored glasses, I've prepared a two-pane anaglyph of the same pair of images. I took the liberty of cloning out the registration crosses and enhanced the contrast a bit.

Click on this image to see a 1200 pixel-wide version.

[url=http://forum.ourdarkskies.com/gallery_images/1215226433/gallery_131_16_269535.jpg][img]http://forum.ourdarkskies.com/gallery_images/1215226433/med_gallery_131_16_269535.jpg[/img][/url]

Do I see a tiny bit of the modern-day Hummer design in the Lunar Rover?

-Noel