New NASA Images Show Location of the Lunar Library | Hacker News Reader

New NASA Images Show Location of the Lunar Library

medium.com

73 pointsabbe9848 comments

I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed.

If I were a billionaire and could figure out a way to do it, I would send a hoax backup of Planet Earth, artificially aged 201 million years (Triassic–Jurassic extinction event). It would include small statue of previously unknown dinosaur species holding a tool and Rick Astley song encoded in a way that takes long time to decode.

This is why we don’t deserve to meet alien life.

> I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed.

Hard. The US (and probably other militaries) has a whole bunch of satellites monitoring the planet for ballistic missile launches, and so would detect any rocket launches.

After that, the US also a bunch of stuff monitoring space junk, and so any payload would be picked up on radar. It would not take many observations to calculate your payload's orbit, and if that orbit suddenly changed it would probably be noticed.

Now, if you suddenly change your payload's orbit to start a trajectory to the moon there would be nothing anyone could do about it, but it would at least be detected.

Announce that you are launching a dummy payload at escape velocity+ to test your new heavy lift vehicle. Something silly, like a Tesla roadster. Once it's beyond radar range (a few tens of millions of km should do), discard the silly shell and fire up the ion engine. Let it run for six months, then wait a couple of years for the final rendezvous maneuver with the moon. With nobody looking for it, the small, stealthy, silent probe which you hid inside the Tesla shell is very unlikely to be detected.

NASA can track stuff that's quite small, so it's going to be hard to be "stealthy":

> Currently, about 23,000 objects larger than a baseball are tracked by the US Air Force from the ground. Knowing their position, satellites can be moved if they’re in danger of a collision, and even the entire ISS can be moved to avoid hitting something.

* https://www.iflscience.com/space/space-junk-as-small-as-a-gr...

New space-based sensors are detecting very small pieces:

> Now, NASA hopes to learn more about the dust-size microdebris orbiting Earth with the Space Debris Sensor (SDS), set to be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) following a 4 December cargo launch by SpaceX.

* https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/nasa-sensor-study-sp...

Those are a few hundred km above Earth. The moon is 384 thousand km further away, and there is no particular reason to watch it closely.

To get to the moon you have to pass through LEO et al. So while the moon specifically may not be watched closely, the paths that you have to cross to get there may be.

Yes, and that's why the solution (which you can read three levels above your reply) is to launch something on an escape trajectory, and then loop back toward Earth once it's out of sight.

> If I were a billionaire

It's a shame how we've moved from being a millionaire to being a billionaire in such a short amount of time...

You will be dismayed...

https://www.quora.com/What-would-you-do-if-you-were-a-trilli...

You can thank inflation, the government's biggest hidden tax. And of course, it hurts the poor the most, those without the financial know-how to invest, buy CDs, T-Bills, etc. Yet there are still no moves to stop inflation. Why? Because it's good for business. Cheaper money.

Deflation also hurts the poor, because the remaining debt balance they have stays the same while the price they are paid for the fruits of their labor decreases, and it also encourages those with money to sit on it instead of spending or investing.

The populist policy in 19th century America was to ditch gold for a more inflationary silver standard.

Not all poor are in debt. You are correct that deflation can hurt top; let's judt go back to the gold standard.

Things like these and the Voyager probes etc. always make me wonder:

What is the likelihood of discovering something that small among the vast empty scales of space?

If another species had sent something the size of the Voyager probes into our solar system, or even crashed it into our moon, or Mars, or even into the oceans of this very planet, what are the odds of us stumbling upon it?

The plate they put on Voyager probes are just symbolic gestures. The change of somebody finding the probe is very close to zero.

It's not they are not aimed at any stars so they just travel interstellar space. Within 40,000 years both probes will pass stars from 1.5 light years distance.

But if an alien equivalent of a Voyager probe does drift into our system, what are our chances of picking it up?

Zero. An object of Voyager's size is much too small to be detected by existing surveys - we can't even track most of passive objects in deep space we ourselves put there (see for example various hardware left in heliocentric orbits from Apollo missions, or more recently, Musk's Tesla).

Even in the unlikely case that it was detected, events would turn out similar to the recent Oumuamua discovery. Some papers would be written on theories of its, most likely natural, origin. A last-second mission to intercept it (much less a sample return) would be considered too costly.

There would have to be extraordinary and overwhelming evidence that it's artificial in origin for things to go differently. For a dead probe drifting through space, that evidence just wouldn't be there.

Note that alien civilizations could have vastly superior methods of detecting artificial objects than we have.

I think finding it on the moon might be relatively easy. Not much happens there, so things won't be buried or damaged quickly. In the article there are pictures of the moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter with a 1 pixel/meter resolution, and I expect it will only get better in the future.

The odds of another space-faring civilization with roughly the same detection technology of us finding the Voyager probes is infinitesimally small. However, any civilization that has managed to reach our Solar System (or just beyond it) most likely has technology we haven't even dreamed of, and could possibly detect it with Star Trek-esque "sensors".

The bigger issue with the Voyager probe is that even if some other aliens did manage to find it, the odds that they would be able to replicate a phonograph in order to play the record is possibly a bigger hurtle. In the end, it's a neat symbolic touch for humans on the verge of going to space, but the most likely alien race to recover Voyager is us.

A phonograph isn't necessary to play a record. Various methods of imaging of the grooves would reveal the data.

For instance, archivists can listen to records with a laser-based device to avoid damaging fragile recordings.

Not that the quality is great, but you can play a record with a needle and a paper cone. Obviously, figuring out that you need to spin it and play it is not necessarily an easy leap, but it doesn't require much in terms of actual technology.

They've sent several of these out already (one orbits the sun, one is on Earth, another orbits Earth, and this is on the moon) and plan to send on the order of one thousand.

> "The analog layers contain a subset of the entire collection, and include: [...] (4) The complete Vital Articles of the Wikipedia (the full English Wikipedia text is in the digital layers)."

If we somehow lose Wikipedia and every mirror of the data, we're sending Jimmy Wales to the moon to fetch the off-site backup.

It's going to make a lot of editors really angry that their edits and Talk pages are no longer there...

What I like is that in all likelihood, some time during the next century some archaeologists or history students will go dig on that site, find the disks, find all its technical details on internet and will use it as an historical resource, yet will not learn anything new because wikipedia's history will probably still be preserved in 100 years.

well actually, i hope we'll send updates every few decades and continue this tradition so that it won't be a surprise to archaeologists when they find it and they'll just leave it alone because they already know.

Stephen Wolfram’s, A New Kind of Science (preserved for the future, when people will finally understand why it is so important)

Heh. Seems at least as likely that those future people will chuckle at this the same way we do now about alchemists trying to transmute lead into gold.

It seems ridiculously arrogant to me to do this and not fully and publicly release exactly what was sent.

Presumably, that was the point. It's not about the information per se, which is probably humdrum to us.

Rather it's about multi-generational reputation having increasingly tantalising possibilities.

See Ark of the Covenant and other human-created mysteries.

It’s privately funded. Feel free to send your own library to the moon if you’d like to see it be done differently.

Lots of privately funded things are run in an arrogant, press release, “look at us” fashion. That doesn’t make them useful or interesting.

I had this idea 25 years ago. Only I wanted it to be in the form of exabyte hard drives that could be continually read and written from Earth via laser, but never erased. Wikipedia on the moon, in case we get hit by an asteroid. But hard drive technology is still not good enough to last more than a few decades.

Well, this is good fun but, as they say, if you haven't checked the recovery procedure, you don't have a backup.

So, apart from a microscope, this would require finding the discs, scraping off the epoxy, and uh, going to the moon in the first place.

Another Brautigan library! "It doesn't make any difference where a book is placed because nobody ever checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library." [1]

[1] http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/about.html

While with the amount of collaboration and dedication to curating the contents and delivery of the payload are absolutely incredible, it saddens me to read about the ‘debris’ left in the crash.

For anyone in the industry: is waste created a significant concern when carrying out a space mission?

Only to humans

> is waste created a significant concern when carrying out a space mission?

The Beresheet lander had a dry mass (i.e, not including propellant) of roughly 150 kg. The Moon is naturally impacted by roughly 2800 kg of natural meteors per day -- a few hundred extra kilos of metal debris is not a big deal.

Debris which remains in orbit, or which is likely to reach the Earth's surface intact, is much more of a concern.

What if it gets hit by a meteorite?

I think cosmic radiation over several years is enough to degradate the material.

if they claim it's going to last that long, then they surely have taken that into account.

The article makes claims to the contrary:

> The discs are not affected by cold temperatures, or cosmic radiation.

Yes - you'd think it would be longer lived in orbit. Clearly practicality wasn't the main concern of this mission.

What is the expectancy of a meteorite hitting this exact spot vs orbital decay?

Telecom satellites in geostationary orbit will remain there on a geological time scale. Human civilization could knock itself down to a bronze age level of technology and rediscover spaceflight long before the orbits of any of them decay.

Some weigh as much as 6500 kg. Including a 100 gram library for PR purposes by a private satellite owner wouldn't be too hard. It's a lot less exotic than saying "the surface of the moon", however.

From the article:

"In the last two years (2018 and 2019) — and funded purely by a few donations from friends and our own team — we have sent 4 backups to space.

    One is orbiting the Sun for at least 30 million years, in the glove compartment of Elon Musk’s red Tesla.
    One is orbiting the Earth on a satellite.
    One is now on the Moon for up to 5 billion years.
    And one was sent to space and returned to Earth and will go in a museum."

The Moon has a uneven gravitational field which can cause surprising orbital perturbations. There are some relatively stable orbits known, but it's a little unclear how stable they would be over a scale of many years.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effec...

I really love the fact that the media is readable with reasonably available tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com