Re: Join the NASA design challenge: win 15,000 dollars

Find Me on the Moon: NASA Lunar Navigation Challenge:

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> For Challenge 1, NASA is seeking an orienteering aid that will help the astronauts navigate on traverses away from the lunar lander and return back.
> While there were similar devices available to the Apollo astronauts, NASA is looking for new and unique solutions.
> If your solution is one of the best, you could be eligible for a share of the $15,000 prize purse.
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> For Challenge 2, NASA is looking for assistance in getting to and mapping the bottom of Shackleton Crater.
> The design must work in the extreme conditions of the lunar south pole and Shackleton Crater, map the crater,
> characterize and quantify what is in the crater, and send the data back to be used for future missions.
> If you can solve this challenge by describing your design concept in detail, you could be eligible for a share of the $30,000 prize purse.
>
> ....
> seems to be a good chance to get your product named in the media John L?
> anybody else?
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>
> You got to November 25 2024
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For Challenge 1: A simple drop of Bread Crumbs should work quite easily!! or A spool of thread with one end tied to the lander!!

As for Challenge 2: I will leave that for another to work on.

I will take the $15,000 in a Travelers Checks!! :-)

Les

This reminds me of a scene in the Tom Clancy novel "Debt of Honor set in the early 1990s. An old American couple and their guest were trapped on the Pacific island Saipan when a Japanese force took over the island in a surprise move.

The two men surreptitiously red information to US military command by satellite phone but didn't know how to make sure that the phone was not transmitting signals that could be tracked when it wasn't being used. The lady of the house, an unsophisticated house wife, said something like "I don't know about you guys but me, I'd just take out the battery".

"could be eligible for a share of the $15,000 prize purse" is really tacky. NASA is really in the entertainment business, at great expense in dollars and lives.

All academic research is entertainment business - citation rates are just audience numbers.

What John Larkin doesn't appreciate is that the research is worth doing, and an unpredictable part of it has practical applications - some of them very profitable.

NASA is very much blue skies research, but it they ever divert an asteroid before it makes us extinct, it will have paid off, big-time.

The dinosaurs didn't bother, and John Larkin wouldn't either.

At school we heard what happened to the Bronco-sore-arse*, they were all wiped out by asteroids.

Not by asteroids. One asteroid did for the lot of them.

"In the late 1970s, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luis Walter Alvarez, put forth their theory that the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was caused by an impact event."

I'd got through graduate school long before their ideas had had much of an impact.

Saddle sores. Makes sense.

It doesn't. BRONCO was the trade mark of the British Patent Perforated Paper Company Ltd., London, E9 England. Nothing to do with horses.