Viewing the Dark Side of the Moon
The Moon’s Shackleton Crater had been named after Ernest Shackleton, a man who had become famous as exploring the Antarctic. Located on the moon at the South Pole, it recently has become an area of extreme interest.
Looking as if NASA may be possibly going to use it as a future landing site for their lunar missions–either human or robotic–the “Earth-based radar system in California’s Mojave Desert” has found the area to be much more rugged than originally thought, with towering peaks and deep craters, according to NASA’s officials.
The rugged terrain of the moon is worse than originally thought, and has been considered as a candidate-landing site for a future human mission to the moon. In the year 2006, scientists had targeted the moon’s South Pole three times, while using Goldstone’s 70-meter radar dish. Previously, the best resolution had been the South Pole of the moon, generated by the Clementine spacecraft, resolving lunar terrain features near the South Pole. But the new JPL resolution is 50 times more detailed then the Clementine resolution.
Normal observation of this area on the moon has been extremely difficult as it is out of perception of Earth. Prior to the development of NASA’s orbiting spacecraft any detailed mapping of the moon was impossible to do. The image above of the crater is taken by an advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) which is located on the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 spacecraft, on January 13, 2006.
Last March, a Texas based firm had prepared to set up an orbital gas station for future spacecraft, while seeking out raw ingredients for it. Bill Stone had chosen the South Pole of the Moon to see how much frozen water and other natural materials would be available to him. According to Space.com, once they were found, they would then be processed into spacecraft fuels and hauled into low-Earth orbit for one-tenth the cost of launching them from Earth.
“The South Pole of the moon certainly would be a beautiful place to explore,” said Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. “We now know the South Pole has peaks as high as Mt. McKinley and crater floors four times deeper than the Grand Canyon. There are challenges that come with such rugged terrain, and these data will be an invaluable tool for advance planning of lunar missions.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
