I only caught the last half of a news clip but,NASA will be crashing a rocket into the moon to see if there's water there. It's supposed to be visible(with or without a telescope?) from Earth.
If there is water, it could open up possibilities for a Lunar base. Apparently a lot of people are against this and it costs something like $71 million(?) to do.
Anybody have any more info? I'm kind of pressed for time, I just wanted to get this out there before I have to leave.
Lots more here on this project;
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/index.html (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/index.html)
Ben Bova wrote a great story about this type of idea - finding water ice on the moon. I think it was called 'Moon Rising'.
This will be great news for a more sustainable presence on the moon one day. Helium3 mines must be in the works as well!
So I was up at 4:30am, my telescope trained on the Moon's southern pole AND.....nothing. I watched for a while longer, but didn't see anything, not a flash when the booster impacted (it's wasn't an explosive, just a heavy spent booster). They had estimated the impact would be the equivalent on 1.5 ton of TNT and would create a dust plume 6 miles high. I have a big, 8" Dobsonian scope, so I was right there and still saw nothing. Apparently, NASA hasn't seen anything yet either, their cameras failed at the very end. Other backyard astronomers also report not seeing anything. Bummer! :(
Was the craft in orbit taking pictures too Bryan? Maybe it simply hit at the wrong angle and that kept the dust cloud down.
"The initial explosions will probably be hidden behind crater walls, but the plumes will rise high enough above the crater's rim to be seen from Earth," - from a NASA rep.
We were overcast here, so I couldn't get in on a watch party.
There were two parts to the msission. The booster followed closely by an instrument package which would take pics and serach the plume for water. 4min after the initial impact, that instrument also crashed intot he crater.
I didn't expect to see a flash, but I didn't see any plume either. No one seems to have.
Now NASA is saying that the lighting was bad, that the plume would have been dark grey and was partly in shadow, so observing ti was hard. However, all the instruments were working, so they will get all the data, just not the cool pics.
Does anyone else find this funny that bugger all happened. I mean they spend all that money (which could gave been spent on U.S health care) for what? Camera failure and Bryan with his eight inchies out again. I ask you. ;) lol
Quote from: HawkeyeMeds on October 09, 2009, 07:03:56 AM
Does anyone else find this funny that bugger all happened. I mean they spend all that money (which could gave been spent on U.S health care) for what? Camera failure and Bryan with his eight inchies out again. I ask you. ;) lol
LOL! Not to mention is was chilly out, so you know how that go's.... ;)
Well, they did get their data and it will be interesting to hear if there is frozen water in meaningful quantities under the surface of the Moon's poles. If so, it could harbor a new era in manned space flight using the Moon as a launching point.
It's finally coming! ;)
Quote from: Rico on October 09, 2009, 07:17:13 AM
It's finally coming! ;)
Ah, nice! I still wonder what losing the moon would do to oceans and tides down here though.
On topic, I also what the international community has to say about one country effectively blowing up bits of the moon.
Quote from: Feathers on October 09, 2009, 02:37:58 PM
On topic, I also what the international community has to say about one country effectively blowing up bits of the moon.
Oh, it's all shared research and they aren't really blowing up the moon. :)
Let that be a warning to Mars and Venus!
Quote from: bromptonboy on October 09, 2009, 03:50:06 PM
Let that be a warning to Mars and Venus!
Yeah, they better not get all upidy!
How could we learn anything different by shooting the moon with a rocket than we learn every time a meteorite crashes into the moon?
Quote from: AlanP on October 09, 2009, 08:23:12 PM
How could we learn anything different by shooting the moon with a rocket than we learn every time a meteorite crashes into the moon?
We don't know when a meteorite is going to crash into the moon, they don't exactly have a schedule! This is a controlled experiment where you impact the surface trowing out debris and have a spectrometer instrument vehicle following to analyze the contenets of the subsurface layers. Not sure how hoping to be looking at the exact right spot waiting for a meteor collision could accomplish the same thing.
I think this was on the news a little while back, but this is the first I've heard. I'm quite excited to hear that there actually is water. Wonder how much houses on the moon will cost?
http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/cbc-article.aspx?cp-documentid=22597858 (http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/cbc-article.aspx?cp-documentid=22597858)
"NASA has announced that it found a "significant amount" of water on the moon as a result of the LCROSS impact last month.
Anthony Colaprete, a scientist on the project, estimated there were about 100 litres of water in the crater where the LCROSS spacecraft hit the moon on Oct. 9.
Colaprete presented some of NASA's data from the spacecraft's instruments, including spectrometer readings that strongly suggest the presence of water.
"Indeed, yes, we found water," Colaprete said at a news conference Friday. "There's not just water, but lots of water."
NASA scientists said the lunar crater they hit was actually wetter than some of the driest deserts on Earth.
NASA's discovery is the result of intentionally crashing the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite into the moon and analyzing the explosion and crater that resulted.
There were actually two impacts, the first coming when a rocket stage that had carried a lunar probe hit the crater Cabeus, near the moon's south pole, creating a small crater of its own.
The LCROSS satellite observed the impact, as did the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Hubble Space Telescope, three other Earth-orbiting satellites, and telescopes in the western U.S. and Hawaii.
Then, the satellite itself hit the moon. The two impacts created a crater between 20 and 30 metres across, and a plume between 10 and 12 kilometres across.
Colaprete said vapour from the explosion was detected as high as 20 kilometres above the moon's surface.
The impact didn't result in an explosion that was immediately visible, but NASA said it received a great deal of information from the experiment.
'Not your father's moon'
"We are ecstatic," Colaprete said in a NASA statement. "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapour plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact.
"The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."
Colaprete said he wasn't sure what the other substances might be, because the mission's focus was on finding water, but they could include carbon dioxide, methane, ethanol or methanol.
"All those are possibilities, but we really need to do the work to see what fits best," Colaprete said.
The researchers also saw sodium in the impact. All of these chemicals are seen in other bodies in space, such as comets, which could indicate the source of the moon's water.
The water on the moon could also come from solar wind or the Earth, or it could be that the water's always been there, NASA said.
Colaprete said some of these chemicals were found on moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts, but their presence was explained away as contamination from the Earth. He said the possibility of contamination from the rocket stage or LCROSS itself has been ruled out.
The NASA researchers said water on the moon could be used by a future human settlement there, not just for drinking and bathing, but as a component for rocket fuel, if manned missions are ever launched from the moon.
"The moon still has many secrets," said Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Delory, who was not on the LCROSS team, said the mission's data "is painting a really surprising new picture of the moon. This is not your father's moon. Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could be a dynamic and interesting one."
The new data from LCROSS appears to agree with a finding from India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar satellite, which in August found a chemical signature for water all over the moon's surface. "
Report on YouTube:
LCROSS Science Briefing November 13th 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xVlBa6YKH4#)
Nuke those Moonies.
psik