Space and Space Travel News

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• Space: STS-127: Space Shuttle Endeavour launches successfully from Cape Canaveral.


• Video of shuttle in orbit: www.youtube.com/NASATelevision

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40th ANNIVERSARY OF MOON LANDING

NASA Holds Briefing to Release Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video
By Space News, July 14th, 2009


- Buzz Aldrin on the Moon; credit: NASA

• Slideshow: 40th Moon Landing Anniversary - NASA Video: On the Moon


NASA will hold a media briefing at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, July 16, at the Newseum in Washington to release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

The release will feature 15 key moments from Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s historic moonwalk using what is believed to be the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years. The initial video released Thursday is part of a comprehensive Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project expected to be completed by the fall.

The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. The news conference will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s Internet homepage.

Participants in the briefing will be:
– Richard Nafzger, team lead and Goddard engineer
– Stan Lebar, former Westinghouse Electric program manager
– Mike Inchalik, president of Lowry Digital, Burbank, Calif.

For NASA TV downlink information, schedule information and streaming video, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
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Related:
• AP: NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it
Yahoo: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits

On the Net:
• NASA restored video: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html

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AP

NASA Lost Moon Footage, but Hollywood Restores It
By Gary Detman, AP, July 17, 2009


• CNN Video: NASA's restored 1969 moonwalk

- NASA released newly restored videos Thursday of two U.S. astronauts taking the world's first steps on the moon. The images were released just four days before the 40th anniversary of the historic event that captivated the world on July 20, 1969. The release, part of a larger Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project, features 15 key moments from the historic lunar excursion, NASA said in a statement. Read full article »


Washington (AP) -- NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission. In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.


The Moon viewed from Earth


But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue. The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world. "There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out." The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it.


One of the first pictures the astronauts made on the Moon


The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done. But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder; Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface. Nafzger said a huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. His report on that will come out in a few weeks.





The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them. How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl? Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

Outside historians were aghast. "It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared." The remastered copies may look good, but "when dealing with historical film footage, you always want the original to study," Brinkley said.





Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much." "It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government. They don't think that preservation is all that important."

Launius said federal warehouses where historical artifacts are saved are "kind of like the last scene of `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It just goes away in this place with other big boxes." The company that restored all the Indiana Jones movies, including "Raiders," is the one bailing out NASA. Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., noted that "Casablanca" had a pixel count 10 times higher than the moon video, meaning the Apollo 11 footage was fuzzier than that vintage movie and more of a challenge in one sense.





Of all the video the company has dealt with, "this is by far and away the lowest quality," said Lowry president Mike Inchalik. Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video. Historian Launius wasn't as blown away. "It's certainly a little better than the original," Launius said. "It's not a lot better."

The Apollo 11 video remains in black and white. Inchalik said he would never consider colorizing it, as has been done to black-and-white classic films. And the moon is mostly gray anyway. The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots of a TV monitor.


- Lunar Images


Both Nafzger and Inchalik acknowledged that digitally remastering the video could further encourage conspiracy theorists who believe NASA faked the entire moon landing on a Hollywood set. But they said they enhanced the video as conservatively as possible. Besides, Inchalik said that if there had been a conspiracy to fake a moon landing, NASA surely would have created higher-quality film.

Back in 1969, nearly 40 percent of the picture quality was lost converting from one video format used on the moon -- called slow scan -- to something that could be played on TVs on Earth, Nafzger said. NASA did not lose other Apollo missions' videos because they weren't stored on the type of tape that needed to be reused, Nafzger said.

As part of the moon landing's 40th anniversary, the space agency has been trotting out archival material. NASA has a Web site with audio from private conversations in the lunar module and command capsule. The agency is also webcasting radio from Apollo 11 as if the mission were taking place today.


Photos: From The Moon


The video restoration project did not involve improving the sound. Inchalik said he listened to Armstrong's famous first words from the surface of the moon, trying to hear if he said "one small step for man" or "one small step for A man," but couldn't tell. Through a letter read at a news conference Thursday, Armstrong had the last word about the video from the moon: "I was just amazed that there was any picture at all."

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AP

Space shuttle Endeavour arrives at space station
By MARCIA DUNN, AP, July 17, 2009


• Slideshow: Space Shuttle


Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP) – Space shuttle Endeavour has arrived at the International space station. Endeavour docked at the space station Friday afternoon for a week-and-a-half-long stay. The linkup created the biggest crowd ever in orbit at the same place: 13 astronauts. The two crews will greet one another, face to face, as soon as the hatches between the craft are opened.

Before docking, commander Mark Polansky guided Endeavour through a backflip so the station astronauts could photograph the entire shuttle, primarily its belly. The station crew used zoom lenses to capture any evidence of serious damage from Wednesday's launch. A considerable amount of foam insulation peeled away from Endeavour's fuel tank at liftoff and some shuttle thermal tiles were dinged.
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On the Net:
• www.astronet.ru • www.storymusgrave.com

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• The space shuttle approaches the Int. Space Station
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Other relevant NASA Web sites:
• NASA Headquarters
• NASA History Office
• NASA Image eXchange (NIX)
• NASA Multimedia Gallery
• NASA Human Spaceflight

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Apod: International Space Station / 2 - Web Photos

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• Slideshow: Space Images • Cosmic Views Blog: Earthlings going to Mars!





- The International Space Station and the space shuttle in front of the Sun - Photo Credit: Thierry Legault.
The shuttle Atlantis and the space station can be seen in orbit 250 miles above the earth while the sun is 93 million miles away.





This International Space Station has been seen from around the world. And of course, it has flown above Japan as well. It sometimes
appears as bright as Vega in constellatin Lyra and moves across the sky with the speed similar to that of a jet airplane. When a space
shuttle docks into the International Space Station or when it departs there, both of them are visible as if two bright stars are moving
parallel to each other. The JAXA homepage below lists the time and location where the space shuttle is seen and the direction from
which it appears and the direction to which it disappears in detail. Please check this site and enjoy observing the International Space
Station with your friends and family. More: http://www.vixen.co.jp/English/img/stk_ ... 02_iss.jpg

JAXA: http://kibo.tksc.nasda.go.jp

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http://astroghost.blogspot.com

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• Tuaw.com: iPods rock the Space Shuttle

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CNN News

After walking on moon, astronauts trod various paths
By Chris Chandler and Andy Rose, CNN


- Moon landing sites • Moon Video


(CNN) -- It turns out going to the moon is a tough act to follow. For all their Buck Rogers, "Right Stuff," history-making achievements, the question for many of the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface starting four decades ago ultimately became "one giant leap to where, exactly?" "You have your peak experience at 38 or 39," says space historian Andrew Chaiken, summing up their collective experience, "and [they] have a hard time coming up with something to do for an encore."

Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 16, 1969. Four days later, the first two humans walked on the lunar service; 10 more Americans followed by the end of 1972. In the 40 years since the Apollo program first took humans to the lunar surface, the astronauts' lives have taken diverse paths. Almost all had been military test pilots before joining NASA; in later life, they found themselves ministers, politicians and conspiracy buffs. Some struggled with common issues: Many of their marriages fell apart and alcoholism affected at least one.

In possibly the most extreme case of post-Apollo readjustment, Buzz Aldrin -- the second human being to set foot on the moon -- became a car salesman in Texas. "Not very successfully," the 79-year old Aldrin quickly acknowledges. The Apollo 11 lunar module pilot's post-flight battles against depression and alcoholism have been well-documented, most recently in his own memoir, "Magnificent Desolation." As for a brief stint hawking Cadillacs in the late 1970s, Aldrin told CNN Radio, "Most people who have received a degree of public recognition find themselves financially pretty well off. Doesn't happen to be the case with astronauts."

Others took more existential, even spiritual, approaches to dealing with their lunar experiences. Apollo 15 Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin left NASA and became a Baptist minister. Apollo 14 crewman Edgar Mitchell spent years investigating possible extraterrestrial life; in April, he went public with claims of a government cover-up. Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean, now 77, has spent the intervening decades since his 1969 landing putting his impressions of the lunar experience on canvas. "That's How It Felt To Walk on the Moon" is the title of one his paintings, which now fetch starting-prices of $20,000. "These paintings are the only paintings in history from anywhere else but this Earth," Bean told CNN's John Zarrella.


Apollo capsule aproaching Earth - Nasawatch.com/archives


Not all the Apollo astronauts' post-flight journeys have been so ethereal. America's first man in space, Alan Shepard, who later walked on the moon in 1971's Apollo 14 mission, became a millionaire businessman. Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt -- a geologist at the time, and the only scientist to make the lunar journey -- served a term as U.S. senator from New Mexico, but was defeated for re-election in 1982. Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins served as a top official at the Smithsonian Institution and its National Air and Space Museum.

And the first man to leave footprints in the lunar dust, Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong -- aside from geologist Schmitt, the only other civilian in the collection of moonwalkers -- later sat on several corporate boards and the presidential commission investigating the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Publicly, Armstrong is perhaps better known for being upset about his persona being used for profit. He is known for a series of disputes over autographs, which he long ago stopped signing because he discovered his signature was being sold for profit. He also sued Hallmark in 1994 for featuring his famous "One small step" quote in a space-themed Christmas ornament. News reports say the suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Armstrong's haircuts also became famous. In 2005, he threatened legal action after learning his longtime barber had sold a lock of his hair for $3,000. All part of the territory, says Chaiken.


The Earth viewed from the Moon


His book "Voices From the Moon" is based upon interviews with the surviving Apollo astronauts, and he concludes there's no "lunar syndrome" that's sent the moonwalkers down paths odder than any dozen former colleagues in other lines of work. "I think the whole subject of the effects of going to the moon is something that gets overstated," Chaiken says.

If there is a common emotion among the astronauts, four decades after the Apollo achievement, it may be simple disappointment over space exploration -- or lack of it. "It's all fallen apart," Aldrin says, talking about what may prove a half-century gap between American lunar landings. "We have just taken the wrong pathway." Chaiken agrees this is a near-universal astronaut refrain. "They really have never expected that it would be this long. That here we would be -- 40 years after the first moon landing -- still wondering when humans will return to the moon. I think they're all frustrated by that."

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CNN News

Could moon landings have been faked? Some still think so
By Brandon Griggs, CNN, July 17, 2009


• Photos: Moon landing 1969


Story Highlights
• A cult of conspiracy theorists believe NASA faked the Apollo moon landings
• The U.S. wanted to avoid embarrassment and trump the Soviets, hoax theorists say
• Theorists point to "inconsistencies" in NASA photos and TV footage
• A poll shows 6 percent of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were faked


(CNN) -- It captivated millions of people around the world for eight days in the summer of 1969. It brought glory to the embattled U.S. space program and inspired beliefs that anything was possible. It's arguably the greatest technological feat of the 20th century. And to some, it was all a lie. Forty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon, a small cult of conspiracy theorists maintains the historic event -- and the five subsequent Apollo moon landings -- were staged.

These people believe NASA fabricated the landings to trump their Soviet rivals and fulfill President Kennedy's goal of ferrying humans safely to and from the moon by the end of the 1960s. "I do know the moon landings were faked," said crusading filmmaker Bart Sibrel, whose aggressive interview tactics once provoked Aldrin to punch him in the face. "I'd bet my life on it." Sibrel may seem crazy, but he has company. A 1999 Gallup poll found that a scant 6 percent of Americans doubted the Apollo 11 moon landing happened, and there is anecdotal evidence that the ranks of such conspiracy theorists, fueled by innuendo-filled documentaries and the Internet, are growing.

Twenty-five percent of respondents to a survey in the British magazine Engineering & Technology said they do not believe humans landed on the moon. A handful of Web sites and blogs circulate suspicions about NASA's "hoax." And a Google search this week for "Apollo moon landing hoax" yielded more than 1.5 billion results. "We love conspiracies," said Roger Launius, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. "Going to the moon is hard to understand. And it's easier for some people to accept the answer that, 'Well, maybe we didn't go to the moon.' A lot of it is naivete."

Conspiracy theories about the Apollo missions began not long after the last astronaut returned from the moon in 1972. Bill Kaysing, a technical writer for Rocketdyne, which built rocket engines for NASA's Apollo program, published a 1974 book, "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle." In the book and elsewhere, Kaysing argued that NASA lacked the technology in 1969 to land humans safely on the moon, that the Apollo astronauts would have been poisoned by passing through the Van Allen radiation belts that ring the Earth and that NASA's photos from the moon contained suspicious anomalies. Kaysing theorized NASA sent the Apollo 11 astronauts up in a rocket until it was out of sight, then transferred the lunar capsule and its three passengers to a military cargo plane that dropped the capsule eight days later in the Pacific, where it was recovered. In the meantime, he believed, NASA officials filmed the "moon landing" at Area 51, the high-security military base in the Nevada desert, and brainwashed the astronauts to ensure their cooperation.


- Japan's Moon Explorer


Some believe Kaysing's theories inspired the 1978 movie "Capricorn One," in which NASA fakes a Mars landing on a remote military base, then goes to desperate lengths to cover it up. Others insist NASA recruited director Stanley Kubrick, hot off "2001: A Space Odyssey," to film the "faked" moon landings. Oh, and those moon rocks? Lunar meteorites from Antarctica. Decades later, Kaysing's beliefs formed the foundation for "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" a sensational 2001 Fox TV documentary that spotted eerie "inconsistencies" in NASA's Apollo images and TV footage.

Among them: no blast craters are visible under the landing modules; shadows intersect instead of running parallel, suggesting the presence of an unnatural light source; and a planted American flag appears to ripple in a breeze although there's no wind on the moon. The hour-long special sparked such interest in the topic that NASA took the unusual step of issuing a news release and posting a point-by-point rebuttal on its Web site. The press release began: "Yes. Astronauts did land on the moon."

In various documents, NASA has countered that the Apollo astronauts passed through the Van Allen belts too quickly to be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation; that the module's descent engines weren't powerful enough to leave a blast crater; that the shadows in photos were distorted by wide-angle lenses and sloping lunar terrain; and that the Apollo flags had horizontal support bars that made the flags swing. Kaysing died in 2005, but not before grabbing the attention of Sibrel, a Nashville, Tennessee, filmmaker who has since become the most visible proponent of the Apollo hoax theories. With funding from an anonymous donor, Sibrel wrote and directed a 47-minute documentary in 2001 that reiterated many of the now-familiar hoax arguments.

Critics of moon-landing hoax theorists, and there are many, say it would be impossible for tens of thousands of NASA employees and Apollo contractors to keep such a whopping secret for almost four decades. But Sibrel believes the Apollo program was so compartmentalized that only its astronauts and a handful of high-level NASA officials knew the entire story. Sibrel spent years ambushing Apollo astronauts and insisting they swear on a Bible before his cameras that they walked on the moon. "When someone has gotten away with a crime, in my opinion, they deserve to be ambushed," Sibrel said. "I'm a journalist trying to get at the truth."

In an episode made infamous on YouTube, Sibrel confronted Aldrin in 2002 and called him "a coward, a liar and a thief." Aldrin, then 72, socked the thirtysomething Sibrel in the face, knocking him backwards. "I don't want to call attention to the individuals who are trying to promote and shuffle off this hoax on people," Aldrin told CNN in a recent interview. "I feel sorry for the gullible people who're going to go along with them. I guess it's just natural human reaction to want to be a part of 'knowing something that somebody doesn't know.' But it's misguided. It's just a shame."


- Recent Videos from the Moon: http://www.youtube.com/jaxachannel


It's been 37 years since the last Apollo moon mission, and tens of millions of younger Americans have no memories of watching the moon landings live. A 2005-2006 poll by Mary Lynne Dittmar, a space consultant based in Houston, Texas, found that more than a quarter of Americans 18 to 25 expressed some doubt that humans set foot on the moon. "As the number of people who were not yet born at the time of the Apollo program increases, the number of questions [about the moon landings] also may increase," NASA said in a statement. "Conspiracy theories are always difficult to refute because of the impossibility of proving a negative." Launius, the National Air and Space Museum curator, believes Apollo conspiracy theories resonate with people who are disengaged from society and distrustful of government. He also believes their numbers are overblown. "These diehards are really vocal, but they're really tiny," he said.

But Stuart Robbins, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Colorado who gives lectures defending NASA from Apollo hoax theorists, believes their influence can be harmful. "If people don't think we were able to go to the moon, then they don't believe in the ingenuity of human achievement," he said. "Going to the moon and returning astronauts safely back to Earth is arguably one of the most profound achievements in human history, and so when people simply believe it was a hoax, they lose out on that shared experience and doubt what humans can do."

In its information campaign against Apollo's "debunkers," NASA may have a potent ace up its sleeve, however. Its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is now circling the moon with powerful cameras, snapping crisp pictures that could reveal Apollo 11's Eagle lander squatting on the moon's surface. Then again, conspiracy theorists may just say NASA doctored the photos. "Will the LRO's incredibly high-resolution images of the lunar surface, including, eventually, the Apollo landing sites, finally quell the lunacy of the Moon Hoax believers? Obviously it won't," writes astronomer Phil Plait in his blog on Discover magazine's Web site. "These true believers don't live in an evidence-based world."
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Web Links: Faked moon landing?

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WSJ

One Small Step for Man, One Giant Mess in the Spacecraft
By Stephanie Simon, Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2009


- Apollo 11

- NASA Plans Another Lunar Landing, but Oh! That Nasty Moon Dust


NASA is again shooting for the moon, but before a manned mission can get off the ground, scientists must solve a vexing technological challenge: dust.

As the Apollo 11 astronauts found out when they walked onto the moon 40 years ago Monday, lunar dust is downright treacherous. To the naked eye, it looks powdery, almost fluffy. But each particle is jagged. Dust scratched the astronauts' visors, ground into the joints of their spacesuits, clogged their equipment, and -- after they inadvertently tracked it into their living quarters -- lodged in their lungs. "It gets into everything," says Jeff Hanley, who manages NASA's next-generation rocket program. "Dust is one of the biggest challenges we face."

And yet now, with NASA preparing to set up a lunar outpost by 2020, researchers are clamoring for the stuff. Some need it to conduct medical and equipment tests. Other scientists hope to study the lunar soil to see if it can be turned into bricks or smoothed into roads. A still more ambitious goal: figuring out how to use solar energy to extract the oxygen molecules bound up in the soil.

Add all these research demands together, and NASA will need 500 tons of the heavenly dust, maybe more. And that is a problem. Over several missions, the Apollo astronauts brought back a grand total of 227 pounds of lunar dust and soil. Those samples, said to smell ever so faintly like gunpowder, are stored in a vault at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. To get access, scientists must petition a NASA committee on extraterrestrial materials. If they are approved, they are lucky to get a sample the size of a couple of aspirins. One eminent geologist once got a sample that consisted of six specks. "It's a national treasure," explains Carole McLemore, a NASA project manager. "So many people need moon dirt, and there's just not enough to go around."

NASA's solution? Fake it.

Ms. McLemore helps run a $19 million project to fabricate what NASA calls "high-fidelity" lunar simulant. The process can be as complicated as, well, rocket science. That is because moon dust is not at all like its earthly cousin. The moon is under constant bombardment by micrometeorites, which smash into the surface at tremendous speed, generating an intense heat that fuses dust particles together and melts the component minerals into bits of glass.





When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the moon on July 20, 1969, dust almost ruined the photo op. Compacted dust made the particles interlock like a jigsaw puzzle, forming a rock-hard layer that the flagpole could barely penetrate.

Efforts to re-create moon dust are not unprecedented. In 1993, Texas geologist James Carter developed a simulation of lunar soil, called JSC-1, by milling volcanic cinders collected from the Merriam Crater near Flagstaff, Ariz. The mineral content was a good match -- and JSC-1 was widely used in NASA research -- but the particles didn't have the quantity of jagged edges that make real moon dust such a menace. Mr. Carter refined the grinding process in 2007 and is now making a version with a bit more of a bite. He likes to take the ersatz lunar dust to grade schools to show kids. "They come up and want my autograph," he says.

But JSC-1 was designed to resemble the chemical composition of the basalt rock in the lunar valleys -- the dark patches visible on the moon. The next lunar landings are likely to be in the white patches, known as the highlands. Those are very different in chemical composition and contain more fragments melted by the heat of meteor impact. So NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey teamed up to scour the globe -- or, actually, the scientific literature on composition of rocks around the globe -- for a spot that mimics the lunar highlands. In 2006, they found it around a working platinum mine in Nye, Mont., near Yellowstone National Park. "It's as good as it gets," says Doug Stoeser, co-chief of the federal lunar simulant project.

Every year, Mr. Stoeser supervises a field trip to the Stillwater Mine to collect up to 12 tons of rocks and mine waste. He then has it trucked to Denver, where it is pulverized into smooth, rounded grains. Still, the resulting particles are nothing like the irregular glassy ones found on the moon. Next stop for the stuff: a small engineering firm with a bare-bones office in Boulder, Colo. called Zybek Advanced Products, Inc. A few years ago, in a bid to reduce the days-long processing time for making certain forms of fiberglass, owner Michael Weinstein invented a plasma furnace capable of burning incredibly hot.

The furnace wheezes like an aging jet engine and looks alarmingly Rube Goldbergesque -- all tubes and wires and banged-up sheets of metal. But with two blindingly white, criss-crossing plasma rays, it can concentrate one megawatt of energy on a surface the size of a dinner plate. All that energy produces an astounding heat, topping 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the surface of the sun is thought to be about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "It can pretty much melt anything," says Mr. Weinstein of his furnace.

Mix the right blend of minerals and crumbled rock, zap it in the furnace for 1.5 seconds and -- voila! A red-hot molten mess shot through with glassy globules known as agglutinate, common on the moon but rare on Earth. When it cools, Mr. Weinstein pummels it in a special mill that rips apart the particles with violent sonic booms, turning it into jagged-edged moon dust that he sells to NASA and independent researchers for about $35,000 a ton.





Lunar curator Judy Allton, who works at the Johnson Space Center, says she welcomes the innovation of the moon-dust simulant. Yet there is a wistful note in her voice as she talks about the decades she spent painstakingly sifting through the genuine lunar samples brought back by Apollo astronauts. "It was really gorgeous," she says. "Like jewels." (more)

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NASA News

NASA's LRO Spacecraft Gets its First Look at Apollo Landing Sites


› First Images of Apollo Lunar Landing Sites


NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions' lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon's surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules' locations evident.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was able to image five of the six Apollo sites, with the remaining Apollo 12 site expected to be photographed in the coming weeks.

The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution. (more)

› Read more and view images
› View other LRO moon images

› Global Media Coverage: First Look At The Apollo Landing Sites


› Photos: Apollo landing sites on the Moon


› CNet News: Lunar orbiter photographs Apollo landing sites

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Photo from the surface of the Moon made by Japan's Moon Orbiter (2009)

On the Net:
http://www.sayonara-kaguya.jp/index.html

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Photo from the surface of the Moon from Japan's Lunar Orbiter.




NASA's Lunar Orbiter Photo from the surface of the Moon


On the Net:
Japan Space Exploration Agency (JAXA): http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/index_j.htm
Apollo Lunar Orbiter Photo Gallery: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/