Sending a gift to the man on the moon
- 6th Nov 2015
- Author: Jamie Laughton
A Heart-Warming Tale
Their heart-warming tale includes something close to our hearts, although a long way from the Earth. We are of course talking about the Moon. Many of us were told childhood tales of the Man on the Moon, but the distractions of our lives have left him at the back of our mind. This has been changed by one wonderful little girl who has decided that nobody should be lonely at Christmas.
She has taken it upon herself to send the man a present to remind him we are thinking of him. It’s a nice reminder to show someone they are loved at Christmas and John Lewis and Age UK have also joined forces to raise money for the million older people who go a month without speaking to anyone.
So how would we find the Man on the Moon?
We spoke to the National Space Academy’s Head of Teaching and Learning, Andy McMurray, to offer some assistance in figuring out how to get a present to the Man On The Moon. First we would need to find him.
In the advert the little girl uses a small telescope to discover the Man On The Moon. Using a little bit of science we can work out how easy this would be. The resolution of the telescope is given by a formula called the Rayleigh Criterion, R=λ/D, where λ is the wavelength of the light and D is the diameter of the telescope. We made a few assumptions to help with the calculations and came up with the following numbers;
“The smallest thing we could see would be about 2.1 kilometre across. This would make it a little tricky to spot our lonely lunar resident.”Andy McMurray
Head of Teaching and Learning National Space Academy
R = 550 nm / 0.1 m = 5.5 x 10-6 rad
Given a distance of 384,400 km this is gives the largest image resolvable (assuming small angles) as;
x = R x D = 5.5 x 10-6 x 384,400 km
x = 2.1 km
So our numbers show that using the same sort of telescope as the little girl used, the smallest thing we could see would be about 2.1 kilometre across. This would make it a little tricky to spot our lonely lunar resident. However, we could ask NASA for a little help and use their Lunar Recon- naissance Orbiter. This satellite has been orbiting the Moon since 2009 making highly detailed maps. It even found the Apollo landing sites, so it should be able to help us.
Helium Balloons
Once we have found the Man On The Moon we then need to send him his present. In the advert the little girl has the clever idea of using balloons.
These can do a great job of gaining height here on the Earth, however, in our experience they don’t quite get as far as we need. Special helium filled balloons are often used to explore the upper atmosphere and can reach heights between 20 and 40 km. To be classed as being in space we need to reach at least 100 km and the Moon is a lot further than that. You can see our attempt in the video below.
To get all the way to the Moon we may be able to call on our friend and supporter Ian Taylor MBE. He is the Chairman of a project called Lunar Mission One. They are planning to launch a robotic mission to visit the Moon’s South Pole. While there they want to drill into the surface to learn more about the Moon and whether we could build a crewed lunar base there. This is something maybe the Man On The Moon could help us with having lived there for a while!
The Lunar Mission One team also want to take a ‘Life on Earth’ time capsule to the Moon with their spacecraft. This would be full of millions of digital memories from people all of the world.
