Why are there no live video cameras on the moon?

it was the whales they heard.. true story.. read hitchhikers guide... GRIN

There are probably already plenty of cctv cams on the moon, but is not available to view on-line. It's in place for aliens to keep an eye on boisterous American military types who like to mess around, play golf outside... smashing the odd window. Hey.. imagine an episode of Big Brother on the Moon? 'ooops.. hey hey.. US Commander is being called in by the aliens to the 'sin' room to answer Q's why he just broke a window while playing basketball...'

Is the United States the only nation capable of putting a camera on the moon? If all of you want this done so badly, call up your government and petition a mission. See if your country can pull it off. As for the Unites States. We have been there, had a look around, even went for a drive. There is nothing of interest, especially considering the cost, initial and long term. But yes, Canada, France, England, Russia, put a camera on the moon.

Because the people who live there don't want EARTH people WATHCING them.

Daaah...

Do you want to be WATCHED???

I heard North Korea are going to do it

How dumb can you get?
WHAT'S TO SEE?
It is a dead rock.
For crap sake, you can see that from here!
If you want to stare at a blank canvas,
don't do it at taxpayer's expense.

A live 24/7 camera cannot be put on the moon forever. Eventually whatever power source powering the camera would die.

You would need a self sustaining power plant on the moon to have anything like that.

Wouldn't anything you're seeing "LIVE" be the sun shining on the other side of the earth and so bright you wouldn't see anything else?



On the rare exception to this, when there is an eclipse all you'd see is lights on earth in populated areas so what can we really see from the moon "live"?

Now, the far side of the moon looking out, but we also can't see that live unless it was pre-recorded.

"Why are there no live video cameras on the moon?"

There WERE, but BRIEF hacked into them to find twinks.

:fullretard1:

I'm gonna say it's for two reasons...

1. If we want to see the moon it's far cheaper and easier to view it with a telescope (at least the side tidally locked to the earth). NASA could launch a multi million dollar mission to land a webcam on there or just point a 5000 dollar telescope at the moon, see more of it, have spent waaaaaaay less money and use a better camera. If your trying to see the far side of the moon it is tidally locked away from the earth and the camera won't be able to see the earth, it's one or the other. If your curious about aliens on the farside of the moon this wouldnt help either, I could put a webcam in the Sahara desert and tell you there were no humans in Africa, wouldn't prove anything.

2. If you want the camera pointing back at earth, there are already other options, missions are frequently launched to the international space station, they can put a webcam on there for a lot cheaper and point it at the earth; maybe not as "zoomed out" as the moon, but they just saved tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and didn't have to start a new mission.

I own an 8 inch dobsonian I bought for a few hundred bucks, I can see the moon pretty damn well. If nasa spent millions of dollars to get a live feed up there I would actually be disappointed, I can see it with my own eyes any time I want better than the webcam would see it for a millionth the price, I would be happier if they spent the money going after harder goals like exploring Mars or whatever. Now if a hundred years from now it cost dirt to get a high der webcam to the moon to see the earth I would think it was pretty cool

It would be too expensive to be worth while. They have cameras on tge space station.

Probably someday it will be possible for someone to send one up privately but by then we will have new one world order, and one world order regulations and laws further restricting our civil liberties.

All your spaces belong to us..

Are we supposed to drop billions of dollars to.....put a webcam on the moon??

better why aren't there any rovers send to the moon, its much closer, moon has more interesting things to still be discovered, it has H30 in abundance which is a good fuel source, a rover like the mars rover should be possible and take for ones some nice pictures like the mars rover does...... more samples etc its just strange why they don't send one to the moon and let it do its stuff, im 100% sure that the missions to the moon where way not sufficient to get all the needed data.

Be careful what you wish for. NASA can easily make fake render of the moon and put it on a 72hour repeat cycle

Then you would have your fake moon and people would be making stupid claims like they do on the stupid soho images

Back when everyone was sending landers and surface probes there, modern solid state (semiconducor like integrated circuit chip) image sensors like CCD (Charge Coupled Devices) and CMOS (Complementary Symmetry Metal Oxide Semiconductor) image sensing devices that we take for granted today did not exist. The CCD and CMOS image sensors that we have today use very little current at a very low voltage, They usually also incorporate tiny filters on the sensing chip so that sequential pixels are individually sensitive to Red Blue and Green (RGB).

These tiny, built in fixed color filters enable the CCD or CMOS image sensor to capture color images without requiring any more power. This is all done expending VERY LITTLE electrical power. Because of this, they make wonderful imaging devices for modern space probes that have to manage to work with either the output of fairly small solar panels that charge batteries. The batteries are elecrochemical and have a finite life. Or, the probe is operated from a Radioisotope Thermal Gennerator (RTG) that is also not very powerful and may also be storing some of its power output in electrochemical batteries. This RTG + Battery approach allows the probe to have available continous low power, and the ability to draw on the batteries for short duration high powered activities like steering an antenna. The rechargeable batteries have a finite life.

This background is necessary to understand why we don't have live deep space video feeds. It's largely about power. When countries first sent things to the moon in the 1960's and early '70s, THE king of imaging devices was a highly specialized VACUUM TUBE! It was called the Vidicon, and it repaced larger ealier tubes like the Image Dissector, the Iconoscope, the Image Orthicon and the Orthicon. The grand and new replacement was the Vidicon tube.

As you will see, just the power requirement would not have been inconsiderable.

The Vidicon tube like all thermionic emission based vacuum tubes had a filament heater that in turn had to heat a small metal tube that was coated with chemical that would emit electrons when heated called a cathode. This "tube heater" power is essentially wasted power compared to modern semiconductors that release their needed electrons without needing to electrically heat a cathode. So how much power did a typical late tube era device use just for heater power? Well, by then the typical smaller tubes used the equivalent of 6.3 Volts at 600 Milliamps (or 0.600 Amps) Using Ohms law, multiply the Volts times the Amps to get the Watts used just for heater power: Or 3.78 Watts. But to use a Vidicon tube, there is more power needed. A Vidicon tube uses what is called electromagnetic deflection. It uses one pair of coils that create a shifting electromagnetic field to scan the electron beam in the tube horizontally, and another pair of coils to manage the vertical scanning of the electron beam. The circuitry to create the special scanning waveforms uses power not required by CCDs or CMOS. Then their is the power that is fed to the horizontal and vertical deflection coils. Let's be VERY optimistic and say that all of the deflection circuits and coils can be powered with only four watts. That is the amount of power used by a traditional incandescent night light bulb. This brings the extra (above that used by CCD and CMOS imagers) to around 7.78 Watts. We're not done yet. The Vidicon requires several different high-voltages, so this brings the total ADDITIONAL power required over and above modern semiconductor imagers to at least 10 Watts.

Then the rest of the camera circuity will draw power. For that era, a monochrome camera (black and white using a single vidicon tube) might have required an additional 10 Watts. Now let's add color. To keep circuit simplicity and keep power as low as possible, engineers back then built in a motor driven transparent rotating color wheel. It worked be alternately placing Red, Blue and Green filters in front of the vidicon tube. The motor to spin the wheel at a precisely controlled speed required additional power, and also additional control circuitry to emded special signals to tell the distant receiver what color is being scanned and sent. This all requires extra power, again being optimistic, let's say that it was an additional 5 Watts. Now we have added an extra 15 Watts of power consumption over and above a modern video camera. The parts and designs were designed for reliability and not to cut component count and reduce power consumption. The rest of the circuits probably drew around (again optimistic) 10 Watts, for a total for just the color camera of 25 Watts. There are also two things to keep in mind about such a camera:
1 - The Vidicon tube like all tubes slowly wear out the cathode and also becomes slightly "gassy". The first reduces sensitivity. The second makes electron beam focus and therefore image clarity "fuzzy." The wear out for most tubes often becomes noticeable after around 5,000 hours of use. Yes, there are exceptions. Early undersea cables could last MUCH longer, but they were not run at very high voltages. Some portable subminiature transmitter tubes had planned filament lives of only 100 hours as they had cathodes run HOT to get more power and gain.
2 - The color wheel is mounted on bearings of some sort and has an electromagnetic motor as the motive force. Bearings and motors wear out, too.
Then there would have to be a control computer built out of parts then available and tested. It would be slow, limited, and crude. Let' say that the engineers managed to use a mix of discrete and RTL tecnology and manage a super simple controller tgat "only" draws 30 Watts.
Now we are at 55 Watts. Then there must be a command receiver. It has to be sensitive, low noise, and reliable. Let's allow 10 Watts.
Now we are at 65 Watts.
Then for a live feed, along with all of the other "Always On" systems listed above, there has to be a transmitter, designed not fir efficiency, but for extreme reliability, government (not hobby group) style. Plan on needing about 35 Watts to get out between ten and fifteen Watts.
Sooo.... Not even including power used for antenna steering, the live video transmission system would have probably needed about 100 Watts of power nonstop, no interruptions. Solar cells degrade in a harsh UV environment like the moon.
Then, on ground side, a Very Large, expensive microwave dish would have to be dedicated to ground reception. There would be ground station staff on salary. There would be maintenance costs. There could be Internet wide bandwidth server and connection costs.
And let's not forget the cost of designing, building, and launching the live video stream lander which would have been substantial
And NEVER EVER FORGET that the camera would have had a limited life.So to get the true cost let's shoot way high and say that a special Vidicon and the color wheel mechanics work without failure for 10,000 hours. Suppose that the entire life costs including launch, design, hardware, groundstation costs for 10,000 hours of use could have been accomplished "somehow" for "only" US $250,000,000 would result in a cost for the live video feed of US $25,000 per hour.
Does this help answer why it wasn't done?

But the banksters were too big to fail. No expense too much for that.

how come we haven't turned it into the USS Deathstar...

Go-Pro + motorized 360 degree 180 degree swivel mount = a few solar panels + a computer guided radio dish.


Maybe not live all the time, but at least for a few minutes here and there when everything lines up to make it possible.

Because we are not allowed: the moon is inhabited. Earth citizens have endangered the moon - wanting to take nuclear bombs there. See also THE BATTLE OF HARVEST MOON, as told by Dr. Peter Beter, Letter 26

Last Edited by Colour Crusader on 11/10/2020 06:10 AM

there's no power supply on the moon

I don't know what the moon is but I know it's not what NASA tells us.

A few easy proofs that it is not a spherical rock in space.

- a full moon is uniformly lit from the center out to the edges. You shine a light on a ball, the center of the ball closest to the light source is the brightest and it gets less bright as you move away from the center of the sphere.

- a rock cannot reflect light with that degree of luminescense.

The moon is not a spherical rock that we can fly to and land on...