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Moon Cam

Soapy Sam said:
The moon's not in orbit?
Why am I always the last to know?
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I wasn't talking about the moon, but the telescope. A telescope on the surface of the moon wouldn't be referred to as 'in orbit'. You failed at your attempt to be pedantic.
 
There are several web sites in the USA where you can remotely control a camera. If memory serves, I used to point a camera run by a Minneapolis television station at a walking mall (so I could get some idea of the weather and pedestrian traffic for my walk home).

Why not do something similar for the Moon? After the novelty wore off, pretty much anybody could have an opportunity to give commands via the Internet to point the camera, and within seconds see the effects of the commands, and could then rightly claim to have taken an action that caused a physical effect ... ON THE FREAKIN' MOON.
 
ellindsey said:
Astrobotic Technology is building a lunar lander which will deploy a rover with camera that will send live video back to Earth. If all goes to schedule, it will land in December 2013.

http://astrobotic.net/activities/tranquility-trek/
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One of the Lunar X-Prize teams.

John Cameron is one of the X-Prize board members. Thus he is in no position to help a team. But I'm hopeful he will work with a team or teams after the contest ends.

Cameron is pushing the envelope for telepresence. He worked with R.O.V. pioneer Bill Stone for Titanic and also his documentary Aliens of the Deep. Telepresence is the core premise of his movie Avatar. Not only did the movie have biological telerobots, but also more plausible mechanical exo-suits which the mercenaries used for heavy labor as well as combat. The exo-suit operator dons a motion capture suit within the machine. I am hoping for something like these exo-suits but with remote motion capture suits.

Cameron tried to get his 3-D camera on the Mars Science Laboratory rover. But the November launch date didn't give enough time. I am hopeful his 3-D cameras will find their way to rovers on the moon.

Rovers on the moon could be much more able than Spirit and Opportunity. For one thing, lunar light lag is only 3 seconds. For another, the moon's proximity allows higher bandwidth. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter enjoyed 100 Mbps.

And the state of the art for telerobots has moved forward since Spirit and Opportunity were launched in July 2003.

Telepresence may become a form of space tourism. If anyone could make money from it, Cameron could.
 
JCM said:
Moon Cam :D
We currently have the technology to have a camera that broadcasts to the web on the moon and an unmanned mission could accomplish this task. Why in today's commercial space enviroment has this not yet been done? About how long do you think it will be before there is a webcam on the moon? What would be the costs? It seems to me Moon cam offers the potential for a large fortune in advert revenue if there were an exclusive distribution channel of the only webcam on the Moon.
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What would be the point?

After all considering that the lunar night is about 14 days long then the camera would not be able to see anything on the surface for half of the time.

Also, considering that the lunar landscape is about the most static landscape there is, then continous pictures of the same thing really do not sound all that interesting; therefore it does not sound like a good marketing tool to line up advertisering dollars.

And besides, if someone really wants to see the Moon, then all that they have to do is go outside and look at it.
 
Madalch said:
How do you keep the mercury liquid at 30 or 40 K?
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You're conflating two separate statements.

Here's two more separate statements: Hawaii is a good place to grow pineapples. Hawaii is a good place to go scuba diving. I'm guessing you would reply "How do you grow pineapples under the ocean?"

Sometimes it's hard to tell if someone's cracking a joke or whether they're truly DTF.
 
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Brian-M said:
How about a high-powered mercury liquid mirror telescope on the moon? Assuming you could haul enough the materials up there,
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Perhaps the mercury part could be made from in situ resources.
Surprisingly enough, the LCROSS ejecta was 1.2% Mercury (Hg):
N 6.6000%
CO 5.7000%
H2O 5.5000%
Zn 3.1000%
V 2.4000%
Ca 1.6000%
Au 1.6000%
Mn 1.3000%
Hg 1.2000%
Co 1.0000%
H2S 0.9213%
Fe 0.5000%
Mg 0.4000%
NH3 0.3317%
Cl 0.2000%
SO2 0.1755%
C2H4 0.1716%
CO2 0.1194%
C 0.0900%
Sc 0.0900%
CH3OH 0.0853%
S 0.0600%
B 0.0400%
P 0.0400%
CH4 0.0366%
O 0.0200%
Si 0.0200%
As 0.0200%
Al 0.0090%
OH 0.0017%


Brian-M said:
the absence of an atmosphere and lower gravity (allowing lower RPM) would make it easy to build one that makes the Large Zenith Telescope in Canada look like a kid's toy.

Now that would be one hell of a webcam. :)
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Brian-M said:
You'd be waiting for a very long time, because the earth doesn't rise/set from the viewpoint of a fixed location on the moon. The moon is tidal-locked, remember?
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The earth wouldn't rise or set, but it would make a small circle in the lunar sky over the course of a month. This is caused by the fact that the moon's orbit is elliptical, so its speed around the earth varies. But the rate at which the moon rotates on its own axis is constant; it doesn't vary with its orbital speed. So the end result it that sometimes we can see a little beyond the usual edge of the moon.

There's also a latitudinal component due to "slight inclination between the Moon's axis of rotation and the normal to the plane of its orbit around Earth"

Libration


Steve S
 
HopDavid said:
You're conflating two separate statements.

Here's two more separate statements: Hawaii is a good place to grow pineapples. Hawaii is a good place to go scuba diving. I'm guessing you would reply "How do you grow pineapples under the ocean?"
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And I'm guessing you'd look really good in a killfile.
 
Charlie Monoxide said:
IIRC, didn't that internet inventor suggest having a satellite(s) aim at the earth and broadcast 24 hours on a televison channel? back in the late 90's?

Charlie (Gore in '00) Monoxide
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Dish Network channel 287 is a live earthcam.

picture.php
 
HopDavid said:
You're conflating two separate statements.

Here's two more separate statements: Hawaii is a good place to grow pineapples. Hawaii is a good place to go scuba diving. I'm guessing you would reply "How do you grow pineapples under the ocean?"
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It seems that you could simply say, "I was suggesting two separate telescopes, one, with liquid mercury, and another infrared telescope in a crater at the lunar pole which would be at 30 to 40 K. The former would be in a place whose temperature is amenable to a liquid mercury telescope." or something like that.

Sorry, I just don't understand the need for arguing with someone who simply misunderstood your meaning.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if someone's cracking a joke or whether they're truly DTF.
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:confused:
http://www.acronymattic.com/DFT.html
 
Madalch said:
How do you keep the mercury liquid at 30 or 40 K?
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Good point, you don't. Heating elements would use up too much power without large banks of batteries, so for about half the time you'd be stuck with a frozen metal surface.

Wondering if a mercury mirror would still be as reflective when frozen, I came across this article...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14030-liquidmirror-telescopes-are-a-reality-at-last.html

It doesn't exactly answer what I wanted to know, but it does say...
Another group is studying the possibility of constructing a telescope with a liquid mirror twice as wide, and there are even proposals to put a liquid-mirror telescope on the Moon.
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The ultimate liquid-mirror telescope could one day be constructed on the Moon, with a diameter of 20 to 100 metres, which would offer insight into the formation of galaxies in the very early universe. A Canadian team is studying the possibility of a smaller 2-metre liquid-mirror telescope for the Moon as a step towards this.
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Seems like I wasn't the first to think of that idea.

It links to another article which supposedly answers the question, but I can only get as far as this...
But until now, it has been impossible to make a liquid mirror suitable for the Moon, as temperatures there fall as low as -147° Celsius - far below mercury's freezing point ...

To continue reading this article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist
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:(

But if it freezes while being spun to produce a parabolic curve, I wonder if it could also double as a radio-telescope?
 
Roboramma said:
It seems that you could simply say, "I was suggesting two separate telescopes, one, with liquid mercury, and another infrared telescope in a crater at the lunar pole which would be at 30 to 40 K. The former would be in a place whose temperature is amenable to a liquid mercury telescope." or something like that.

Sorry, I just don't understand the need for arguing with someone who simply misunderstood your meaning.
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You're right.

Sometimes I'm an irritable old curmudgeon quick to assume someone's yanking my chain.

I owe Madalch an apology.
 
Brian-M said:
Good point, you don't. Heating elements would use up too much power without large banks of batteries, so for about half the time you'd be stuck with a frozen metal surface.
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The two week nights would drop the temperature below Mercury freezing, but not to 30 or 40 K. The only places that reach 30 or 40 K are the basins of permanently shadowed craters at the poles.

The lower latitudes see fairly dramatic temperature swings. If there wasn't power to keep the scope at constant temperature, it would suffer stress since various materials expand or contract at different rates with a temperature change. Such power would be expensive.

Got this from Wikipedia:
Surface temp. min mean max
equator..........100 K 220 K 390 K
85°N.............. 70 K 130 K 230 K

There are some plateaus at the poles that enjoy nearly constant illumination. The temperature swings are less dramatic: -50° ± 10° C. Melting point mercury is -38.83º C (234.32 K). So Mercury telescopes could be kept liquid at these locations without a horrendous power expense.
 
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