Friday, May 19, 2006
Lunar Science Beckons
Good considerations when we make it back to the moon. I always thought the moon would be incredibly interesting. During Apollo, we didn't know what to look for. Now we know that even small bodies like Enceladus have great surprises; no reason to think the moon doesn't hold the same.
Wednesday on NPR's Morning Edition, there was a piece on finding ancient Earth fossils on the moon. The notion is that since geologic processes have pretty much wiped everything in the Earth's record prior to 3-point-something billion years ago, we could find Terran meteorites on the moon with very early Earth microbes.
To tell you the truth, Mars isn't greatly interesting to me. If I had a choice, I'd spend a few months on the moon above a long trip to Mars and back.
China is preparing it's first lunar mission.