Moondust Graffiti

The monkey face on mars shows just how dramatic a picture can be
made with the long shadows of shallow relief. On the moon a relief
rendering could be accomplished with something similar to a scaled up
dot matrix printer on the underside of a rover.
Lets say it could stamp out a square foot in ten seconds. That
would be 3M square feet in a year (half that if only powered by solar)
or a square mile in eight years. Memorials, epitaphs, epithets,
advertisements, marriage proposals and birthday messages could be set
in the fine grain surface of the earth's ancient companion. Multiple
pictures, taken from a mast on the rover, documenting a "moonglyph" in
different lighting and changing distances, could be used for mementos,
business cards and screen savers.
For $100 a square, this claim to immortality could bring in $300M
a year to the provider of the service and the estimates for speed and
area are very conservative.
A more advanced version could carry darker basaltic soil to write
on the lighter anorthisitic highlands. A commertial enterprize to
jump start the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources, and find
gold in the rising of the harvest moon.

Samples of moon rock prepared as slides for microscopic
examination were thirty microns thick. If a cm^2, that would be about
100 to the gram. Assuming 80% waste that would be two million slides
per 100 kg of rocks. An additional 80kg plus diamond dust from the
saw could be subdivided a billion times into still visible samples.
Set in clear epoxy and micro photographed to establish authencity they
might sell for $5 to $10 each, more than enough to pay for the small
space program necessary for their collection.

Stephen Kearney