Hubble to scope out the lunar surface
A little while ago, I covered the LROC that NASA will be sending up in 2008. Now there are plans to use Hubble to look at the lunar surface in an effort to find, you guessed it, suitable locations for lunar bases.
Why the redundancy between the two craft, I don’t know. The LROC seems to have UV mapping capabilities similar to Hubble. The LROC will be going up long before any lunar bases will, and it will offer far greater detail than anything that Hubble could do, and that will be the only task dedicated to the LROC. Hubble cannot photograph anything less than 50 meters wide. (Initially it was reported as 60 meters, but this New Scientist article says 50 meters; I’m not sure which one it is.) In any case, Hubble still won’t be able to photograph the Apollo relics, the largest of which is 9 meters.
Reportedly, the UV capabilities of Hubble are second-to-none, and astronomers want to identify a mineral called ilmenite — or iron titanium oxide — which has previously been found in lunar soil samples. This mineral seems to be the Swiss Army knife of rocks:
It contains oxygen, which could be extracted for breathing, as well as hydrogen and helium absorbed from the solar wind. Heating the mineral would release the gases, which could then be used as a power source for the base, says Hapke. Iron in the mineral might eventually be used to produce construction materials, such as steel, for lunar buildings.
By analyzing areas where the concentration of ilmenite is known to be found, astronomers will be able to calibrate their UV light measurements so that they can accurately measure their concentrations on other parts of the lunar surface where astronomers have not walked.
But I still wonder why they want to use Hubble instead of waiting for LROC. If the UV capabilities between the two instruments are that dissimilar, I’d love to know, otherwise this seems like a waste of time and money.
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[...] Back in July of 2005, Google launched Google Moon, a map of the moon similar to their map of the Earth. Of course it doesn’t have roads and such because there aren’t any, and you can’t see things like the remains of the Apollo moon missions for reasons that I outlined in this post — namely the resolution of the lunar satellites and space telescopes don’t have the resolution to pick up the debris objects (yet). [...]
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