Posts Tagged ‘India’
|Speed Limits on the Moon
Saturday, May 26th, 2012
(This post is not at all related to photography. So if you’re interested in reading about photography, you can skip this post. But when I read this today, I thought it was so interesting I just wanted to post it.)
It turns out that there is going to be a lot of traffic on the moon in the next few years.
A number of countries (including Japan, China, India, possibly Brazil, etc.) are planning to send missions to the moon in the next few years. In addition, the Lunar X Prize contest (run by the X Prize Foundation and Google) has gotten something like 26 different entrants competing to become the first privately-funded organization to land a robot on the moon, and the deadline to claim the $20 million prize is 2015.
So with all this upcoming traffic on the moon, NASA felt the need to make recommendations to the various interested parties about how to avoid damaging historically- and technologically-important landing sites, artifacts and equipment still on the moon’s surface. They made recommendations about minimum keep-out distances (stay at least a meter away from any tools you find, and 250 meters away from the Apollo 17 landing site!), flight trajectories (don’t fly directly over the landing sites!), even speed limits for the rovers.
That’s right folks… we now live in an age where there are speed limits on the moon.
I happened to see the NASA report with all these recommendations today, and even though I’m not a scientist or rocket engineer, I am a giant geek when it comes to these things, and it was fun and fascinating to read part of the report.
If that sounds interesting to you, you can download the whole report here:
Speed limits on the moon… this certainly is an amazing time to be alive in the world.
Tags: Apollo, Brazil, China, Google, India, Japan, Lunar X Prize, Moon, NASA, X Prize Foundation
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