LRO development Options

[jamescanvin]

Just read this interesting article about LRO

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/28apr_lro.htm

"This is the first in a string of missions," says Gordon Chin, project scientist for LRO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "More robots will follow, about one per year, leading up to manned flight" no later than 2020."

One per Year? Is this just wishful thinking or have any tentitve plans been mentioned for follow up missions after LRO? If the next one is going to be 2009/10 then I guess some desisions about it will have to be made fairly soon.

James

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

That first rumor about Seasat's early demise got around a lot -- I remember seeing it somewhere in the science literature at the time.

It's certainly more plausible than the second rumor; if the Russkies had shot up Seasat, then the US could just have sent up a replacement -- and if the Russkies had shot that one down too, we would have been in Cuban Missile Crisis territory again in jig time.

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

That first rumor about Seasat's early demise got around a lot -- I remember seeing it somewhere in the science literature at the time.

It's certainly more plausible than the second rumor; if the Russkies had shot up Seasat, then the US could just have sent up a replcement -- and if the Russkies had shot that one down too, we would have been in Cuban Missile Crisis territory again in jig time.

I agree. I think they could have done it, they pretty much wrote the book on lasers and phase-conjugate optics, but I don't believe they would have done something that overt.

I would not be surprised if there was some negociation about the technology. One side being able to see submarines could be interpreted as strategically unstable. Nuclear submarines are a major deterant to first strike.

Oh wow, my 100th post. I'm not a Junior anymore. :-)

[mchan]

I recall reading some Congressional hearings transcripts on this. Basically, the testimony was that subs could not be detected by the Seasat SAR. Some ocean images were shown of where there were supposedly US subs. Of course, there was nothing that stood out visually. But nothing was said on signal processing the data to look at it in different ways, e.g., frequency domain analysis as mentioned above.

That said, however, the technology goes both ways. The US would have had more to lose than the Soviets from a space-based sensor capability that would render the oceans transparent. Unless, of course, there is a lag to one side acquiring the technology and the other side actually uses its technological advantage while it has it. Which happily never took place.