SpaceMETA and SETI. SpaceMETA Announces that Historical Moon Sites will not be the primary Targets and defines new premisses for Landing Zone
Rio de Janeiro , May , 2011.

After several weeks of debates with the community on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, mainly about landing zones and what to do once on the Moon, SpaceMETA has decided not to focus on visiting the Lunar Historical sites from ancient missions as a priority objective.

According to Sergio Cabral Cavalcanti, founder and visionary of the SpaceMETA Lunar Micro Explorer Mission, to bring some experimental Roboid to these areas involves a very high risk ( Roboid is the codename of the one of the “personalities” of the Solitaire Lunar Module).

Sergio believes that some of these old mission areas still have operational equipments which can be used on a future emergency scenario for humans in a critical situation. Furthermore, some of these equipments may have radioactive energy cells and the risk of damage to these cells is just too big to be contemplated.

The probability of malfunction of the Roboids is quite high since this will be SpaceMETA’s first experience on the Moon, and so we must avoid destroying not only a historical site, but also the memory of the early days of the Lunar Exploration.

Another important fact is that, during close to half century, the old artifacts have accumulated a lot of information on their surface (such as particle collisions, radiation tolerance, etc) , and this information should be preserved for future studies when humans will be living on the Moon.

Sergio says that, originally, the ancient site contest was very exciting and a motivational idea, but that after taking into account all the reasons stated above, SpaceMETA is downgrading this objective for a secondary level priority. This means that if all the first priority objectives are attained, the Roboids will decide in real-time what to do in addition – and a visit to these sites can be on the to-do list. “We really don’t know the answer, it will be decided there, in real time, on the Moon Surface”, says Sergio.

All Roboids will be loaded with a to-do-list and decide there, according to the mission-status-score-card, what it will realize after landing. Since all kinds of Roboid movements include a near-chaotic component on the equations, we don't know where Solitaire modules will really be, and also how the desacceleration process will occur when it receives the command to stop due to the friction of the lunar dust and the rigoliths. Therefore, all precaution should be taken to avoid accidents.

As a consequence, SpaceMETA is developing as primary objectives the search for Life and Inteligence evidences on the Moon, and is accepting suggestions from amateurs and professionals as to the appropriate "suspect" areas that should be visited.

According to Sergio, “we don't expect to find any three-dimensional, human-level intelligent, visible, spectral and friendly form of life or even some evidence of this on the Moon, and at this moment we also do not expect to find any dust-eating microbe there. What we really expect with this attitude is to take a first step toward bringing together a multivision , multidisciplinary team, inviting people involved in other areas of human knowledge to share in space exploration.”