HumansInSpace_Art

The artwork gets encoded into a radio signal that gets transmitted from the Dwingeloo (yes, that's its real name) radio telescope in the Netherlands. The same antenna receives the signal as it returns from the Moon. It takes radio waves about 2.5 seconds to travel to the Moon and back.

If the Moon were made of barbecue spareribs, it would not be very appetizing, I'm afraid. After 2 weeks in a hot oven followed by 2 weeks in the freezer, alternating for 4.5 billion years in a vacuum, they'd be kind of dried out.

Yes, NASA now has plans to put people (not just men) on Mars. Unfortunately we can only afford to take small steps in the foreseeable future. We're building a new crew capsule that can handle Earth re-entry speeds coming back from Mars. We're building a new heavy-lift rocket that can be used to assemble a Mars ship, which will weigh a hundred tons or more, in space. We're planning human missions to lunar orbit and possibly to a captured asteroid in the next ten years or so. But an Apollo-like campaign to Mars won't happen without Apollo-like budgets! During the Apollo program, NASA's budget had ten times the buying power it does today.

There are also some private organizations (such as SpaceX and Mars One) that are looking at putting people on Mars. --Stan

For human exploration of the Moon, the United States feels as though it's already accomplished its main goal. But every other spacefaring nation is interested in sending people when possible. By then, the US may have changed its policy.

Humans could do a lot of interesting science on the surface of the Moon, which is essentially a small planet. There's plenty of geology to do there, and also prospecting for resources like water, iron, and titanium.--Stan

Figuring out the distances to astronomical objects is a huge part of astronomy. There are many methods, each suited to a different distance range. The whole set is called the "cosmological distance ladder."

For things in the inner Solar System, we can bounce radar off the planets and measure their distance from the time it takes the radio signal to go and return.

For the outer planets, we can observe how the planets move. When we've watched them travel around the sun for a while, we can plot their orbit size and use the law of gravitation to calculate how far from the sun they are.

For nearby stars, we can watch the stars shift their positions as the Earth goes around the sun. This "parallax" shift is very small, but once measured we can use that shift the same way your two eyes triangulate on objects to determine how far away they are.

For faraway stars in our Galaxy and in nearby other galaxies, we can find stars that are twins of nearby ones whose distance we can find by parallax. By seeing how much fainter the distant star is than its nearby twin, we can calculate how much further away it is.

For galaxies at moderate distances, we watch for Type 1 supernovas, which are exploding stars that take a few weeks to brighten and fade. They always reach the same peak level of energy output. By measuring how bright they appear to us, and by knowing how much energy they are putting out, we can calculate the distance.

For distant galaxies, we can measure how fast the galaxy recedes from us because of the expansion of the universe. The speed is related to the distance by a simple multiplication factor.

--Stan

The Moon is the only logical place to prepare for human exploration of Mars, the solar system, and beyond. In addition, the Moon has minable resources that are useful for us on Earth and to facilitate solar system exploration.--Georgiana