Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday June 11 2018, @04:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the anthropogenic-lost-records dept.

Science Alert has a story about a long running Lunar temperature measurement that apparently was lost and forgotten for decades.

Between 1971 and 1977, Apollo scientists conducting experiments on the Moon discovered that the surface of our li'l satellite buddy got mysteriously warmer. But the data from 1974 onwards went missing, and the strange warming phenomenon remained an enigma. The experiment was called the heat flow experiment, and it was designed to determine the rate at which the interior of the Moon loses heat.

Astronauts with Apollo 15 and 17 drilled holes into the lunar surface, up to depths of 2.3 metres, and probes measured the temperature at several depths in the holes.

These were long-term experiments, left in place after the astronauts departed, and transmitting data back to Earth.

The measurements revealed that the temperature of the moon at all measured depths got warmer from the date the experiment started in 1971 all the way till measurements ended in 1977.
That's a relatively short period of time on a planetary time frame. A rate of warming that rapid would have the moon surface incandescent well before we were began squabbling over who got to live in the best caves.

Various theories were put forth, but in the end people pretty much agreed it must be our fault.

In typical NASA fashion, the data was archived on tape, filed in the tape vault, and promptly forgotten, lost, moved, etc. Decades later, someone went looking for it. Some 440 tapes were found, (less than 10%) badly degraded over time. Some were recovered, Logs (written ones on that old unreliable medium: Paper) were found and when combined these sources recovered significant portions of the long lost data.

After 8 years of analysis, the data showed that the warming continued, all the way through until the end of observations in 1977. It also showed that, closer to the surface, the warming was more pronounced; and the warmth reached the shallower depths sooner, suggesting that the warming was occurring from the surface down, rather than radiating out from the Moon's interior.

So were the astronauts doing that? The researchers believe that their movements were disturbing the dirt on the lunar surface.

"Recently acquired images of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera over the two landing sites show that the regolith on the paths of the astronauts turned darker, lowering the albedo," they wrote in their paper.

"We suggest that, as a result of the astronauts' activities, solar heat intake by the regolith increased slightly on average, and that resulted in the observed warming."

In other words, when they stomped about and drove lunar rovers all over the landing sites, the Apollo astronauts overturned the topsoil, exposing darker regolith underneath. Darker surfaces don't reflect as much light; instead, they absorb it.

So this darker lunar surface at the Apollo sites absorbed more of the Sun's heat, raising the Moon's surface temperature by a few degrees.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @06:08PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @06:08PM (#691516)

    Its not that they didn't land stuff on the moon, its that there are a bunch of oddities surrounding the human moon landing videos and pics shared with the public. Almost like they did run a parallel "fake moon landing" project and then commingled the results with real moon landing stuff for whatever marketing or PR purposes.

    Even this story notes how awful nasa was about saving the data from that time, almost as if they want it to go away. This has to be some of the most expensive and precious data on the planet? How can they treat it like this to the point it is "typical"?

    In typical NASA fashion, the data was archived on tape, filed in the tape vault, and promptly forgotten, lost, moved, etc.

  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 11 2018, @09:38PM (6 children)

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday June 11 2018, @09:38PM (#691628)

    Even some Doctor Who and Star Trek episohave been lost forever. Maybe nerds are just bad at long term storage.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @10:30PM (#691645)

      Did those episodes cost 107 billion (2016-adjusted) dollars?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:51PM (#691888)

        People weren't interested in the same things back then that they are today. That includes the preservation of history, it just wasn't something that crossed people's minds. Not only that, it was more expensive and took up a lot more of people's time to do.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 11 2018, @10:50PM (2 children)

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 11 2018, @10:50PM (#691652) Homepage Journal

      Long-term data storage is difficult.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:42AM (1 child)

        by frojack (1554) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:42AM (#691732) Journal

        Long-term data storage is difficult.

        No, it isn't.
        Its just not a ONCE and DONE thing.

        These tapes needed to be copied onto fresh tapes (or more permanent media) every 5 years or so.

        Everybody knew this at the time. Recopying tapes to new media was one of my first tasks in my first job in a large data center.
        New tapes were never put directly into production. They went into archive preservation, and the existing archival tapes (written once)
        were copied to the new tapes, and then the existing tapes were rotated into production.

        As a consequence we never had archival tape failures. We always got to them first with the preservation process.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @08:34AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @08:34AM (#691829)

          These tapes needed to be copied onto fresh tapes (or more permanent media) every 5 years or so.

          That works great for digital media, because the copy will be without noise (as long as the noise is small enough that it won't change any bits (after error correction, if any).

          Now try the same with analogue. I suggest you find a couple of old VHS decks. Copying every five years since late 1960'es / early 1970'es is about ten generations. Let us know how much of the original video remains.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:49AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:49AM (#691779) Journal

      Even some Doctor Who and Star Trek episohave been lost forever.

      And even some letters of your comment, it seems. ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday June 11 2018, @11:45PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 11 2018, @11:45PM (#691665) Journal

    I'm pretty sure the 1960 Census happened, but when the agency I worked for tried to get copies of the original data around 1985 (to compare against the most recent data)...well, we'd lost our copies (800 BPI even parity...too many read errors to recover) so we tried to get copies from the Census Bureau...and they'd lost them too. I forget exactly which survey we were after, I think it might have been the blockface long-form, since the 1980 census tracts didn't match the 1960 census tracts due to shifts in population. I think we went from something like 1005 tracts to 1200. Those are extremely rough number, though, because I haven't looked at the records for about 30 years.

    But losing archival records isn't as rare as one would hope it would be.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.