Lunar junk
Here's a pretty good roundup, courtesy of Scienceray, of all the human-made junk left behind on the Moon. I think you could probably finance a private moonshot by preselling all this stuff to museums and collectors!
Lunar Leftovers: How the Moon Became a Trash Can (Thanks, RJ!)
The Apollo program left behind it (as did Lunokhod 2) several vital pieces of Lunar laser ranging equipment. Lasers down here on earth are pointed at the ones on the moon and the time in which it takes the light to return is measured. In this way the distance to the moon can be measured and monitored. Apollo 11 left the first one in 1969 and it has had forty years of continuous operation ever since. Apart from these few pieces of equipment, the rest of the items on the surface of the moon are redundant - or destroyed by impact. Welcome to the most distant trash can we have.
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So, nobody owns the moon. The junk left behind belongs to the US. Is it American property or do some sort of salvaging rights apply here? And is there an ethical issue around leaving what are essentially historical artifacts in tact?
Think you could have a mission ready by the 30th anniversary of Salvage-1 next January?
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/9782/salvage1.html
Anyone remember the short lived Salvage 1?
A fortune waiting to be made...
"So, nobody owns the moon."
Hmmm...not clear that is the case. While there is a treaty relating to Lunar real estate (The International Moon Treaty, 1984), it has not been ratified by any spacefaring nation and it's unclear what force it would have over private individuals.
However, that applies to the real estate itself. The Apollo/Ranger/Surveyor hardware is certainly still the property of the US, as the Lunokhod stuff is Russian....um....or Soviet property.
#@: Wasn't that with Andy Griffith, or am I thinking of something else?
I think it works out to about 5 grams of junk per square kilometer on the Moon. That's an American nickel.
Not the furthest. The junk we left on Titan (the Huygens probe) is a billion miles further away.
Samsam
Why go all the way to the moon? Plenty of valuable space junk in Earth orbit...
Well, the parachutes and dead instruments of the Huygens probe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe) are a lot farther away, also the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are dead junk floating away and a hell of a lot more distant.
#6 Sanity, there's also plenty of space junk on Mars and a bit on Venus, too.
Yeah, I was just pointing out that there's far more distant junk out there.
I'm not sure that sitting there passively reflecting lasers can be regarded as "continous operation." Certainly the RTGs powering other experiments have probably degraded enough that they're no longer providing data.
Sanity: Yes, but are these other places can shaped, as clearly the moon is? ;D
"However, the biggest trash can outside of earth's atmosphere is in fact the moon."
Guess again. There's more junk in orbit around the earth than was left on the moon. It's constantly being monitored for potential collision damage with operating satellites and spacecraft.
"the most distant trash can we have..." Really? What about all the defunct probes on Mars? Not to mention of course Voyagers 1 and 2, now a considerable distance beyond our solar system. Of course these don't qualify as "junk", since as we all know, these will eventually evolve into a godlike being. Either that, or Jeff Bridges will discover them and come to Earth, where he will have many adventures.
#1: There are several legal categories of found property, including mislaid, lost, embedded, treasure trove, and abandoned. The junk on the moon seems clearly to be in the "abandoned" category, having been purposefully left in a public(?) place from which the then-owner did not intend to retrieve it. The first person to take physical possession of abandoned property has valid title to it.
Of course, I'm talking about American law, which may not apply on the moon. And I can't say for certain that there was no intent to retrieve the stuff, but we've had our chance for four decades now; I'd call it abandoned.
I don't think the laser ranging stuff should be considered "abandoned" or junk. People are still using it (at least on Mythbusters to prove that man did walk on the moon.)
I've actually had a chance to see one of the last remaining moon ranging lasers. An interesting fact that the operator told me, is that the same instrument I was looking at, is the same laser used since the beginning of the program. There are also occasional maintenance issues that the observatory needs to address, and they quickly found out that the specifications required for these parts are so difficult to achieve, that the knowledge of how to manufacture these parts has been somewhat lost.
Another interesting tidbit: the moon is not in a closed circular orbit, but in a spiral orbit. The moon gets further from us each year by about 1.5 inches. This was discovered using the mirrors placed on the moon.
quote:
#2 POSTED BY GARYG, MAY 14, 2009 4:47 AM
Anyone remember the short lived Salvage 1?
A fortune waiting to be made...
Ha-ha, I came here to post that too. Even looked it up on IMDB to get the series name correct. The pilot movie was very enjoyable, just saw it again recently.
-Carrie
One of the Apollo astronauts gave me permission to drive the lunar rover he parked up there, so the rest of you can just take a step back.
Seriously, these sites are so historic that the thought of disturbing them for artifacts is incredibly repulsive.
Let's change the parameters. If you can recover something without touching a single Apollo astronaut boot print, or leaving any new markings, it's yours. The 12 moonwalkers deserve to have their footprints last for a billion years.
Per a previous BB post, astronaut Charlie Duke left a family portrait on the surface of the moon during Apollo 16: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/11/more-man-made-object.html
"The Apollo program left behind it (as did Lunokhod 2) several vital pieces of Lunar laser ranging equipment. Lasers down here on earth are pointed at (delete the words "the ones", & replace with "mirrors") on the moon and the time in which it takes the light to return is measured (factoring the speed of concentrated light into the equation.)
Not that it wouldn't be cool to use the moon
to fire lasers "from".
There is little enough human made material elsewhere in the solar system and beyond (junk in Earth orbit excluded) that what is out there isn't exactly garbage, despite being abandoned. It has historical significance beyond its monetary and recycling value. That might change should we get a permanent presence 'out there', but right now our space rubbish isn't exactly rubbish, it's more like an archaeological site.
Now if someone should come up with a way to cheaply and effectively sweep the near-earth traffic lanes of floating debris, you would probably get kudos from all spacefaring nations, plus salvage rights :)
let's not forget the LEM landers that were left behind: every one has a plaque listing the astronauts, NASA bigwigs, and, at the top of every lander, the one name that should motivate every democrat to return to the moon: richard m. nixon, enshrined for eternity;-)
"Another interesting tidbit: the moon is not in a closed circular orbit, but in a spiral orbit. The moon gets further from us each year by about 1.5 inches. This was discovered using the mirrors placed on the moon."
No, this has been known for a long time. It is a consequence of the tidal interaction between the Earth and the Moon. The Earth's rotation slows down due to tidal friction, and its lost angular momentum is transferred to the Moon. Essentially, the Earth's rotation carries its tidal bulge a little bit ahead of the Moon's position in the sky, resulting in a slight forward gravitational tug on the Moon.
Paleontological evidence has existed for decades that demonstrates this effect. We didn't need to go to the Moon to discover it.
It also precesses like crazy, but that's another story.
Wasn't some of this stuff already promised to the Smithsonian?
The way things are going, the moon will belong to China. China is very likely to become the first nation to colonize the moon, and any attempt to establish a rival colony will be met with missiles, or at least threats. When Congress and NASA finally figure out whose campaign contributors get which contracts, any US spacecraft bound for the lunar surface may need to request landing clearance from a Chinese traffic controller.
The Japanese have an idea about how to deal with space junk - watch this show:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
for real - the only hard sci-fi on television in any country for AGES.