"William Elliot" wrote in message
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On Sun, 22 Oct 2017, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"William Elliot" wrote in message
On Fri, 20 Oct 2017, Fred J. McCall wrote:

The chasm, 50km (31 miles) long and 100 metres wide, appears
to be structurally sound and its rocks may contain ice or
water deposits that could be turned into fuel, according to
data sent back by the orbiter, nicknamed Kaguya after the
moon princess in a Japanese fairytale."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/...sation-of-moon

should send a rover to check it out
Rovers can't do spelunking. You'd have to send people.

Why? A rover could go in, take a look around and come back to
tell us what it saw.

And how do you navigate? Radio isn't going to work well, and while an
autonomous rover sounds like a good idea, they work best when we
already know the terrain.

Place a transmission station at the entrance.
That'll do until there's a bend.
So bring along a relay for each bend.
Otherwise, a cable connection would have to be laid as the rover roves.
Let's ask Comcast. :-)

It's funny you mention this. The first idea has been looked at for cave
rescue, but so far hasn't been done, at least routinely. It may work better
in lava tube because they tend to be straighter and less mazy (but that's
far from true too). But there's no guarantee until we go.

As for laying cable, actually that's what we do now for cave rescues (where
shortening communication times is paramount), but it's not as
straightforward as you might think.
And woe be the rover that catches the cable on something or jams the reel.
(We've already had this issue with a tether deployment in LEO).

So possible, but like any engineering challenge, there are questions and
it's not quite as straightforward as you'd think.

Keep in mind too, you have to land the rover in the lava tube, that's going
to take some pin-point aiming too. We'll definitely want to get a MUCH
better map of the floor.

Most likely because the roof has caved in, the floor will be littered with
chunks of rock. A rover is NOT going to easily traverse those.

To give you an example, a lava tube in Oregon I was in earlier this summer
had a width that was probably 200' wide and distance from floor to ceiling
varied from probably 25' to 100' because of the piles of basalt that formed
basically small hills inside the lava tube. Even as an experienced caver,
this was NOT easy ground to traverse.

I can NOT imagine an form of a Mars based rover making it more than 100'
beyond the entrance in this particular lava tube.

In theory a lava tube should be relatively smooth on the inside except
for chunks that have fallen from the ceiling, there's no guarantee
what we know about lava tubes here on Earth cleanly translates to how
they'd form on the Moon, or how this particular one would form.

So, you really want to have someone on site. And once you do, you
might as well just use them to explore the tube.

On their own without outside communication?


Sure, why not. We have cavers who routinely spend 3 days to weeks
underground. Granted, it's NOT a mode NASA is used to operating in, but
there's no guarantee NASA will be the ones doing the exploration.

The logistics are more complicated, because you will have to bring shelter
and air and the like, but it's definitely doable.

Look at some of the work Bill Stone has done in Sistema Huautla. Oh and he
has experience working with NASA.

I'm pretty sure he'd be willing to go.

And trust me, there's no shortage of cavers here on Earth that would
be willing to check out a lunar lava tube.

I'm probably a bit too old to go, but you know, I've got some time to
spare if NASA is willing to provide transportation.

How about lodging and supplies? Pack your own backpack?


Sure. I can be packed and ready to go any time!


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/