Have you ever wondered why no government, corporation or billionaire has not yet launched unmanned rovers on the moon? It seems to me there should be more interest in doing this and it's a hell of a lot closer to us than mars. I can think of all kinds of fun things to do with a lunar rover, take pictures, broadcast signals, laser the earth... Another thing that popped into my head was use a rover to paint or rake large areas of the lunar surface. There's an art form called "raked sand" where even large images are created on beaches. This might be possible on the moon. I made a rough guesstimate that you'd need an image at least 900 square kilometers to be visible from earth. A plausible solution may be to have dozens of rovers working together. Maybe launch 10 rockets each with 10 rovers. 100 rovers raking 10 square meters of moon sand a day should take 2.5 years to create something visible from earth. Imagine looking up at the moon some day and seeing a tiny Coca Cola, Pepsi, Apple, or Microsoft logo. I'm not saying it's at all ethical and it would definitely cost billions. Certainly interesting in a technological POV, I think.
I think it's a matter of the costs outweighing the kinds of fun things. When we are progressing a bit in the space program there will be more activity on the moon again as well. There just seems to be no priority at the moment. I mean, it would be handy to have an international moonbase for several reasons but we haven't reached the ability to work on most of those reasons yet. So, going to the moon with either robots or humans seems to be only a priority for countries who haven't been there yet.
Anybody here saw this movie?: "Moon is a 2009 British science fiction drama film directed by Duncan Jones.[3] The film is about Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell), a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the Earth's moon.[4] It was the feature debut of director Duncan Jones. Kevin Spacey voices Sam's robot companion, GERTY" From wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(film) I really liked this one myself, so I recommend it!
There's no dark side of the moon, there is however one side never seen from earth. The fact that the same side of the moon always faces the earth is a benefit for any potential rover. It's always in line of sight contact with some place on earth. There's also potential benefits for rovers landing on the far side of the moon and doing experiments permanently shielded from earth by the moons body. The far side of the moon actually gets more sun during it's "day" than the side we see because the earth isn't blocking it. A moon's day is ~28 earth days, same as it's orbit. So solar power rovers need to deal with at least 14 days of darkness plus earth's shadow on the earth facing side.
This was incredibly well made one! Perfect athmosphere with perfect music with awesome scenery and awesome plot. No idea why it didn't get any oscars...
Yes, very good atmosphere To relaxxx, by the way the reason why I noticed that movie here is because Earth's population there gets most of the energy they need of the sun's warmth on certain area's on the moon's surface. If you get excited and click on that wiki link I just wanna add the obvious: don't read the plot! It will ruin the movie if you haven't seen it
The Soviet Union did it in the 1970s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme What an obscene thought! Thank goodness it's too expensive to be practical.
interesting, but terrible idea about raking logos into the moon. i like that movie Moon too. relaxx, about the moon's "day"... does it take 28 days for the moon to revolve around the earth? cuz that would be the moon's "year" right? the moon doesn't rotate, which is why the same side is always facing us.
The moon's year would still be rotation around the sun, not the earth. Which is same as earth year + or - 7 days. From the point of view of the sun, the moon rotates 1 full turn every ~28 days, as it orbits the earth.
I think that'd be pretty bad ass, but too expensive. Maybe if i'm a multi--billionaire I will buy the rights to the moon, and paint a giant heart/peace sign, and right love over top of it.
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I found out that the earth's shadow (lunar eclipse) only lasts up to 4 hours and it doesn't happen every month because of the slight tilt of our orbits. So the effect of the earths shadow on solar rovers is negligible.
Turns out I'm not the first to think of this, go figure... http://www.moonpublicity.com/ Realistically, it would be more like this: