"William Elliot" wrote in message
.com...

On Mon, 23 Oct 2017, Greg (Strider) Moore 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."

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.

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

Logistics. Caves tend to be windy. So the number of repeaters can climb
quickly. That said, research is still ongoing.


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.

What's happened? Tangle foot had to be rescued?

Cave rescues vary in nature. Get your hands on the American Cave Accident
report for an idea.


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).

That would be far as it would go.

Wow, that's great mission planning. "Well if it breaks, so what?"

Since the point is to explore the target, you really can't say, "Eh, so
what."



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.

Why expect the impossible? Go over to the edge and jump in or lower
yourself with a cable into the cave. With luck, a walkin opening
would be found.

Wait a second... you just went from wanting to land a rover in the cave
entrance, to accepting people as part of the mission.
Guess you do see the value of people.



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.

Even with a lift from above. So if you get stuck, at least you made a
landing and have in place look see.

So you see a pile of rock. Umm. Ok. But that's barely scratch the surface
(or below the surface as the case may be).

We want to find things out like how large it is, are there flat areas large
enough for us to place structures, is it airtight enough that in parts
perhaps we can even use the lava tube itself as an air pressure.

We're also interested in the geology. How exactly does the magma flow in
1/6th G and zero atmosphere. My guess is noticeably different from here on
Earth.


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.

The heck with six wheel. Let's crawl like six legged insects.

Great, and our experience with these on foreign bodies is how much?

So you've again changed the engineering problems.


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

That's as big of a deal as hours on Venus or days on Titan.

Hardly. It barely tells you anything about the 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.

What do they do with all their poop, **** and crud?

Carry it all out.
This isn't an issue on the Moon since there is no biosphere you risk
contaminating.
In many caves they setup their base camps near a water supply so they don't
need to carry water IN, but they do need to carry their used water out!


Are all meals prepared and ready to eat?

Depends. For morale, fresh cooked is usually better.

Are they cabled to the outside of is it an isolation ward?

Depends, but generally there's NO outside contact. It's just not feasible.
So you need folks who are trained to operate on their own and collect data
and do the proper research.

It's certainly possible, just very different from the current NASA model
where Houston wants to watch you 24/7. But, this is going to have to change
if we want to get serious about 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.

What was that?

Like I said, look it up.



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!

With all of your needed supplies?

If NASA is providing the transportation, I'll find a way! ;-)



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