Planetary Society Hangout, Jan 31, 2013: Sarah Noble on Working on the Moon from Washington

We welcomed guest Sarah Noble to our weekly Google+ Hangout. Sarah is a lunar geologist and a civil servant working in the Research & Analysis program at NASA Headquarters. We'll talk about squiggly lines on the Moon, about working at NASA HQ, and the lunar mission launching later this year, LADEE, for which Sarah has recently been named Program Scientist. (Congrats, Sarah!)

As always, this is a public service of the Planetary Society and we depend on member support and donations. Find us at http://planetary.org

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Nicklas Hansen]

How much will this entire project cost?

[planetarysociety]

LADEE is a very low-budget mission by planetary standards. The total cost will be around $263 million, about half the cost of the usual small robotic mission.

[Joe Hallam]

Rest assured, their would be NO shortage of donations for this bold plan for Mars! A conservative estimate of at least 6 or maybe 7 hundred trillion dollars would flow in the first week, or maybe even the first millisecond of the announcement! Then, they would at long last be free to enjoy their extremely liberating and very very peaceful religion until the planet turns red with blood.... Oh wait.... redder? Peace OUT! ha ha.

[Joe Hallam]

The most intelligent thing to do would be to colonise Mars and then declare it a Muslime planet. Then, we could send every last one of these dear misunderstood peace loving

brothers and sisters to a brave new world to at last do something for the good of all humanity! 'Thats one small step for islame, one gigantic sigh of relief for the rest of us!

[EthanNin0]

With the new Mars rover, they should try a Stirling Radioisotope Generator instead of the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. The SRG is supposed to generate 4x as much electricity as the RTG.

I have a serious question. How DO we increase the NASA/Planetary Science budget? There was a WeThePeople petition asking to reallocate defense funding to NASA, but the White House responded saying they couldn't do it. There's gotta be some way, right?

[Michael Jobin]

As a kid I thought that the Moon shows one side to Earth because that side has more mass and is more attracted to Earth.

[Samer Hariri]

Were any aeromagnetic surveys done on the moon? 

[Kevin Russell]

The value of going back to the Moon vastly underestimated exploration. Just like our Ocean, we know very little about it.