Lunar Mission One Wants To Crowdfound A Robotic Moon Lander

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Lunar Mission One Wants To Crowdfound A Robotic Moon Lander

Lunar Mission One Wants To Crowdfound A Robotic Moon Lander:

Just hours after announcing that it plans to put a robotic lander on the moon in the next decade, the British-led group Lunar Mission One is already a sixth of a way to its £600,000 (US$940,000) initial crowdfunding goal.

The money is intended to jumpstart the project and move it into more concrete stages after seven years of quiet, weekend work, the group said on its Kickstarter page.

“We’ve reached the limit of what we can do part-time. The next three years are going to be hard, full-time work to set the project up. We need to confirm and agree the lunar science and develop the instrument package,” the page read.

Artist’s conception of Lunar Mission One’s robotic lander touching down on the surface. Credit: Lunar Missions Ltd.

“We need to plan and research the online public archive. We need to get commercial partners on board to design and develop the lunar landing module and the drilling mechanism. We need to pilot the education programme. We need to prepare the sales and marketing campaign for our memory boxes. And we need to do all of this globally.”

Among the rewards is something called a “digital memory box”, where you can upload your favorite sounds to be placed on the spacecraft. The group also plans to offer a little bit of physical space to put a strand of your hair along with the small digital archive.

And what does the group want to do there? Drill. It would place the lander at the Moon’s south pole and push down at least 20 meters (65 feet), potentially as far as 100 meters (328 feet), to learn more about the Moon’s history.

Artist’s conception of a moon drill that could potentially be used by Lunar Mission One’s lunar lander. Credit: Lunar Missions Ltd.

“By doing this, we will access lunar rock dating back up to 4.5 billion years to discover the geological composition of the Moon, the ancient relationship it shares with our planet and the effects of asteroid bombardment,” the group wrote. “Ultimately, the project will improve scientific understanding of the early Solar System, the formation of our planet and the Moon, and the conditions that initiated life on Earth.”

Private ideas for bold missions is something we’ve heard about repeatedly in the last few years, with initiatives ranging from the Mars One mission to send people on a one-way mission to the Red Planet, to the potential asteroid-mining ventures Planetary Resources and Deep Space Initiatives. As with these other ventures, the nitty gritty in terms of costs, systems and mission plans is still being worked out. This coupled with the long timelines to get these ventures off the ground means that success is not necessarily a guarantee.

Lunar Mission One, however, does have an experienced space hand helping it out: RAL Space, who the Kickstarter campaign page says has helped out with 200 missions. That’s including the high-profile Philae lander that just landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko last week and did a brief surge of science before going into hibernation.

For more information on the mission, check out their leading team here and the official website here.

About Elizabeth Howell

Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

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Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Wednesday, November 19, 2014