Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Mar 7, 2006 2:59:27 GMT -6
World's nations will shoot for the moon in the next decade
In the "space race" of the early 1960s, when reporters asked U.S. rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun what he expected to find on the moon, he jokingly replied: "Russians."
Nowadays, his answer might be: "Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Europeans."
India, China, Japan and Europe are busy launching, or planning to launch, robotic spaceships to the moon and points beyond.
Their goals will include tasks ranging from mapping minerals to seeking ice from which future astronauts might extract drinking water. More distant goals include looking for a mineral called ilmenite that some experts think is rich in an isotope called helium-3. In theory, that isotope could be shipped to Earth and burned in futuristic nuclear fusion reactors.
"It's going to be a very exciting decade," said Carle Pieters, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University who is the prime scientist behind the development of a U.S. instrument that will ride aboard India's Chandrayaan-1. The device, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper -- M3 or "M Cubed" for short -- will measure wavelengths of light from the lunar surface in order to identify elements.
More here: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/05/MOON.TMP&type=science
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It is nice to think that we all can get along as humanitarians and fellow explorers, but in the real world it just isn't gonna be so. Some nation will be the lead one, and it might as well be the United States.