Aside from showing how powerful bored desperate to spend grant money clever we are, what are they expecting to find and how will it help with future moon colonisation?
Why did we bomb the moon?
Aside from showing how powerful bored desperate to spend grant money clever we are, what are they expecting to find and how will it help with future moon colonisation?
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
We're trying to see if there's ice in the dust, which would lend credence to the idea of there being significant amounts of water under the lunar surface.
There were brown people on it.
Seriously, it was to see if there are ice crystals trapped in craters where the sun can't melt them off into space because if there is a water source on the moon it makes the concept of a lunar colony much easier since having to bring your own is heavy and therefore expensive.
Damn you OCS......
Last edited by Cluricaun; 09 Oct 2009 at 09:20 AM.
Hell, if I didn't do things just because they made me feel a bit ridiculous, I wouldn't have much of a social life. - Santo Rugger.
Can we do it again, but on the light side this time?
That one was very unspectacular.
To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation.
Yet another C.H.A.O.S. scheme foiled by top american agent (and 40 something year old vigin) The Almighty Evan and his crack squad of office paper salesmen.
Sorry, they replaced Seinfeld with The Office as a time filler after The Simpsons and Family Guy. I'm still adjusting culturally.
You know, my freshman year of college I took a planetary astronomy class who's final project was to design a scientifically sound space mission. It was a fun project and I did pretty well, but I won't pretend that I really had a firm grasp on the science involved. We weren't really expected to, the purpose of the class was to give us basics and get us excited enough to go on to take other classes (or get our science pre requisit out of the way).
What I submitted looks surprisingly similar to the current moon bombing project, only I suggested doing it with Mars. I am not sure if I should be proud of my 19 year old self for coming up with an idea that is so similar to another idea that was implemented years later, or frightened that our current space missions are seemingly being designed by freshmen taking astrononmy 101.
I will be pissed if I find out my prof, who was working on Casini at the time, worked on this project.
Last edited by NAF1138; 09 Oct 2009 at 11:23 AM.
The Mooninites have WMDs.
It seems protests have begun already.
To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation.
Soup Dragon is going to be really annoyedOriginally posted by ivan astikov
It seems protests have begun already.
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
Take one each space vehicle made of aluminum, titanium, plastics, etc.
Smash it into the moon at high speed, thus vaporizing the vehicle and a goodly chunk of the moon. Even if everything else goes wrong, this is a worthy goal in itself.
Take pictures of the resulting flash of light using a sensitive spectrometer. Also try to get pictures of sunlight through the plume.
Subtract out the spectra of whatever the spacecraft was made of. The remaining spectra tells you how much of what stuff the moon is made of. Water would show up like a flashing neon sign.
Since this is all really just an iron lung and pacemaker for the US space program, maintain a relaxed attitude about the whole thing.
Did anyone watch the mission?
I hope they do get some results from the spectrometer readings, because they won't make a carrot from video sales of that!
I never thought crashing a spacecraft into the moon could be so boring.
Last edited by ivan astikov; 09 Oct 2009 at 04:24 PM.
To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation.
I was watching. You're right; it was conceptually exciting but not visually stimulating.
CatInASuit, how did you manage to be aware of LCROSS without having an inkling of its purpose? I haven't seen a news article that talked about it at all that wouldn't have given you the information you asked for here.
Well, if you just saw a headline or heard it in passing, the purpose behind it could be easily missed. I vaguely remembered hearing about it a few weeks ago, but couldn't remember what the purpose had been.
Is it on YouTube yet?
It was a bit of a visual fizzer, just a couple of white pixels in close up
Yes; just put in "LCROSS" and there are a number of videos.
Definitely not visually spectacular; if you were doing the scene in a movie you'd make it look way cooler. I just hope we got good data.
And here's the NASA video on space.com. They've got a lot of other cool stuff too.
Have the Moonies surrendered yet?
They've suggested a diplomatic wedding between their leader's daughter and a member of a major metropolitan police force. Also, they have a golf resort open.
Can we please stop saying that we "bombed the Moon"?? Please? We did absolutely nothing of the sort. "Bomb" implies some sort of detonation/explosive warhead. We crashed two spacecraft (built on the cheap too) into the Moon, yes, but we did not bomb it.
Looks like 40,000 of them are getting married on Wednesday. http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/091013/K101306AU.html
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