"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

William Elliot wrote:

On Mon, 23 Oct 2017, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

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.

Why not? More expensive than cables? On the other hand, for
twisting, winding, narrow caves, cables would be better, at
least for those portions.


I'm speculating, but I would expect wireless relays to have a lot of
problems with multipath reception ('echoes' from all the rocks and
crap in the cave). Of course, physical wires have the problem that
something actually needs to pay them out and not have problems with
reels and snags.

Yeah, radio's really not my forte, but that's a concern.

But my understanding is with modern signal processing that can be mitigated
somewhat. Whether it's enough, I have no idea.

The more I think about this, the more interesting the problem is.

For example, here on Earth, some folks are starting to use drones in caves.
Lets you explore pits or domes w/o needing to do any rigging or bolting.

But of course that's not really feasible on the Moon.

And of course any of our techniques for going up and down rope here on Earth
are going to be far more complex on the Moon. On the other hand, you've got
1/6th the mass to move. Most likely you'd have to rely on winches, but as a
backup, I think you'd still want to do some version of what's known as
single rope (or knowing NASA, twin-rope) technique hear on Earth.

I think some version of what's known as a rope-walker would work well. Bit
more complex than some other systems, but doesn't rely on bending at the
waist as much.
But still not sure it would be possible to get on/off the rope in a full
suit.

I'm definitely eager now to try to figure out if this is possible!




--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
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