Well that doesnt add up...space imagery and moon landing thread

[Marcos]

So according to this:

http://digg.com/d31EINX

We were able to launch a camera to Mars in 2004 with enough resolution to see the surface of mars to within a few centimeters...yet we've only int he last year been able to capture low-res blurry images of the moon's surface to within a few meters?

How does that add up??

[Stoo]

Different craft with different payload space at a guess

[MadduckUK]

they are still shopping the landing site in realistically enough for higher resolution viewing, give them time

[Saracen]

....

How does that add up??

Well, if you ask me, it's not about what we're technologically capable of doing, but we we actually decide to do. In other words, it's about political will and money, nothing more.

Any space mission is an extremely expensive operation and getting the funding together not only requires intense effort, but it's a competitive process. From a given pot of money, if we do A, it means we can't afford to do B. Or to put it in terms an economist would use, the "opportunity cost" of doing A is not doing B.

So .... we "did" the moon in the 60's. How much do we figure we'll learn from the moon, compared to what we hope to learn from Mars, bearing in mind the hopes that the proof that life does, or could, exist other than on earth may lay on Mars?

Thus, for some time, the moon was largely ignored on the basis that the most scientific "return" for the money was expected from going further afield, like Mars. However, the focus (if you'll excuse the photographic pun, bearing in mind the thread topic) has now changed a bit, and the LRO mission is about mapping the moon with a view to long-term occupancy, presumably with a view to distant (in time) involving, well, who knows, but perhaps long-term manned flights, or perhaps manned bases on other planets. After all, given man's capacity for raping this planet, and for continuous population expansion, if we don't find a way of getting off this planet and 'out there', a la Star Trek, we're going to find, as a speicies and as a planet, some really unpleasant choices facing us, not least of which may well be mandatory population control as an alternative to extinction.

So how it "adds up" is that there is now a growing motivation for developing technologies and knowledge (such as the long-term physiological effects of being in space, or out of Earth's gravitational field), as opposed to simply exploring Mars, or wherever.

It wasn't that we couldn't have sent a mission to get low-orbit high-res shots of the moon's surface before now. It's that the money and will to do it didn't exist. And now it does. Res ipsa loquitur.

[samcross]

Wow!