hand held gadgets for lunar exploration

[Gravity_Ray]

One of the cool things you see in most sci-fi movies is hand held gadgets. Anybody here know a good website to check what type of hand held gadgets will be taken or are being worked on for the lunar exploration?

I just loved it when Spock would take out his tricorder and would take readings. Our astronauts should also have something like that when they get to the Moon. Shouldn’t they?

I know that imagining and other types of scanner hardware has advanced a great deal since the 60s and with miniaturization you should be able to stuff a great deal of capability in a small hand held device that you can then use to make various readings when astronauts are trooping around the Moon.

So anybody know of such devices, or a good website for reading up on this? By the way, I’m not talking about sci-fi stuff, but real stuff.

Thanks

 

[kelvinzero]

(edit: so this is a little old.. still interesting!)

There is a lot of stuff at the nasa site, especially from Apollo.

For example:
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/tools/Welcome.html

There is also more recent stuff about the new rovers etc.. I dont recall anything about new handheld tools.

 

[kelvinzero]

I also tried googling "modern geological hand tools"

which found for example
http://www.geology-outfitters.com/default.asp?c=4

A whole bunch obviously are not relevant, eg anything mentioning 'atmospheric'.. but generally these hand tools will be for geology, or some other common practice already applicable on earth. If you can get a list of activities, then you can also google tools for those activities and so on.

http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/humanexplore/e ... oTools.htm

 

[Gravity_Ray]

Cool, thanks, but I was hoping for something that had flashing lights and went "ping".

Actually I can not wait for the Millimeter wave scanners to become hand sized. Can you imagine how much fun one of those things will be in a bar? My goodness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wave_scanner

 

[kelvinzero]

Well there is no point them going 'ping' seeing as there would be no air to carry the sound.

Perhaps they would have some sort of network connection, wireless or not, to a microphone in the space suit's helmet that goes 'ping'.

Our senses are not very well adapted to the lunar surface. Sound does not carry, distances hard to judge, painful contrast that also obscures objects in shadow.

I think a heads-up-display and an augmented reality helmet could be sensible. This could show information from gadgets and also impose some sort of depth information on the scenery around you. It is hard to judge distances on the lunar surface. Another use could be to block sunlight and reduce painful contrasts more intelligently than just a sun visor can do.

Another application of augmented reality could be artificial stereo sound, eg when someone talks to you, you intuitively know their direction and range. Dangerous objects such as drills could be simulated to create a sound in 3d space.

Im not aware of any plans for this though.

 

[EarthlingX]

I don't know about radiation hardened version, but i would expect such a device based on something like ARM 7 architecture, OMAP (Open Multimedia Application Platform) SoC
It could be matched with a projector chip, and other gadgetry on the Controller–area network (CAN) bus, WiFi, you name it.
Plug in plenty of RAM, touchscreen and solid state disks, and off you go

 

[bdewoody]

Since the only long term safe way to live on the moon will be underground I wonder how long it will be before they build tunnel boring machines on the moon like the ones that dug the Chunnel. Turning the moon into a giant swiss cheese.