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10-09-2009 05:19 AM |
Nasa Bombs Moon Friday || { Now With Results }
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(Oct. 8) -- NASA will throw a one-two punch at the big old moon Friday and the whole world will have ringside seats for the lunar dust-up.
NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon's south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there's any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water — a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon — is hidden below the barren moonscape.
http://o.aolcdn.com/photo-hub/news_g...940718104.JPEG
A missile will slam into the crater Cabeus A Friday morning at 7:31 EDT in an attempt to uncover evidence of water beneath the lunar surface.
The crashing spaceship was launched in June along with an orbiter that's now mapping the lunar surface. LCROSS — short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross — is on a collision course with the moon, attached to an empty 2.2-ton rocket that helped get the probe off the ground.
Thursday evening, about 10 hours before smashing into the moon, LCROSS and its empty rocket will separate.
Then comes the first part of the lunar assault. At 7:31 a.m. EDT, the larger empty rocket will crash into a permanently dark crater and kick up a 6.2 mile high spray of debris.
Trailing just behind that rocket is the LCROSS satellite itself, beaming back to Earth live pictures of the impact and the debris plume using color cameras. It will scour for ice, fly through the debris cloud and then just four minutes later take the fatal plunge itself, triggering a dust storm one-third the size of the first hit.
"This is going to be pretty cool," LCROSS project manager Dan Andrews told The Associated Press. "We'll be going right down into it. Seeing the moon come up at you is pretty spectacular."
Within an hour, scientists will know whether water was hiding there or not.
The mission is a set-the-stage venture dreamed up by the NASA office that has been working on a $100 billion program to eventually return astronauts to the moon. The return-to-the-moon goal is now being re-examined by NASA and the White House.
These are not crashes for the faint of heart. The two ships will smash into the moon at 5,600 mph, more than seven times the speed of sound. The explosion will have the force of 1.5 tons of TNT and throw 772,000 pounds of lunar dirt out of the crater. It will create a new crater — inside an old one — about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool, Andrews said.
But don't feel bad for the moon. It gets crashes this size about four times a month from space rocks. But the difference is this one is planned and at just the right angle and location to provide interesting science for astronomers. The southern polar region is a prime landing possibility. This crater, called Cabeus, is one where astronomers think there is a good chance of hidden ice that would be freed by the crash, describing the dirt there as "fluffy."
The crashes will also be a good show for the folks back home, which was always part of NASA's plan for the probe, Andrews said. The crashes will be broadcast live on NASA's Web site. The Hubble Space Telescope and other larger Earth telescopes will be trained at the moon. Observatories and museums are planning viewing parties in at least three countries.
And amateur astronomy buffs with telescopes who live west of the Mississippi may try to catch a glimpse of it through their own instruments because it will still be dark outside. People who live in areas where it will be daylight won't be able to see it from home telescopes.
"A lot of telescopes will be tuning in," said Terry Mann, president of the Astronomical League, an umbrella group for local amateur astronomy societies. "You might see something you might not ever see again."
Amateurs need at least a 10-inch telescope to look at the crashes and what they see will only be a small part of their overall view in the scope. And they won't see the impact itself, but the spray of debris flying up.
This is all happening during a peak week in a yearlong celebrations commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo using a telescope to see Jupiter's moons. On Wednesday evening, the White House planned a star party for middle schoolers and about two dozen telescopes.
In Boulder, Colo., the Fiske Planetarium on Friday will serve free bagels and coffee to early rising moon crash spectators. The planetarium plans to stream a live video feed from NASA, train its own 24-inch telescope to watch the crash, and let people look for themselves through two research-grade telescopes.
"People like explosions one way or another," said Matt Benjamin, the planetarium's education programs manager. "And a celestial explosion is going to excite them."
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Source :: NASA to Crash Rocket Into Moon
Soooo...who is actually going to stay up late/ wake up early to watch this?
What are your opinions on this?
NOTE :: If you are responding to these questions, DO NOT type the question in you post. If you wish to include the question in your post, then QUOTE them.
Unfortunately, I will miss it, since it will be 4:31 am here. :gonk:
On a related note...
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WASHINGTON – The moon isn't the dry dull place it seems. Traces of water lurk in the dirt unseen.
Three different space probes found the chemical signature of water all over the moon's surface, surprising the scientists who at first doubted the unexpected measurement until it was confirmed independently and repeatedly.
It's not enough moisture to foster homegrown life on the moon. But if processed in mass quantities, it might provide resources — drinking water and rocket fuel — for future moon-dwellers, scientists say. The water comes and goes during the lunar day.
It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.
"It's sort of just sticking on the surface," Sunshine said. "We always think of the moon as dead and this is sort of a dynamic process that's going on."
The discovery, with three studies bring published in the journal Science on Thursday and a NASA briefing, could refocus interest in the moon. The appeal of the moon waned after astronauts visited 40 years ago and called it "magnificent desolation."
The announcement comes two weeks before a NASA probe purposely smashes near the moon's south pole to see if it can kick up buried ice. Over the last decade, astronomers have found some signs of underground ice on the moon's poles. But this latest discovery is quite different. It finds unexpected and pervasive water clinging to the surface of soil, not absorbed into it.
"It is drier than any desert we have here," Sunshine said.
The water was spotted by spacecraft that either circled the moon or flew by. All three ships used the same type of instrument that looked at the absorption of a specific wavelength of light that is the chemical signature of only two molecules: water and hydroxyl. Hydroxyl is one atom of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, instead of two hydrogen atoms in water.
Because of the timing during the daylight when some of that wavelength disappears and some doesn't, it shows that both hydroxyl and water are present, Sunshine said.
This light wavelength was first discovered by an instrument on the Indian lunar satellite Chandrayaan-1, which stopped operating last month. Scientists initially figured something was wrong with the instrument because everyone knew the moon did not have a drop of water on the surface, Pieters said.
"We argued literally for months amongst ourselves to find out where the problem was," Pieters said. Sunshine, who was on the team, had a similar instrument on NASA's Deep Impact probe, headed for a comet but swinging by the moon in June. So Deep Impact looked for the water-hydroxyl signature — and found it.
Scientists also looked back at the records of NASA's Cassini probe, which is circling Saturn. It has the same type instrument and whizzed by the moon ten years ago. Sure enough, it had found the same thing.
The chance that three different instruments malfunctioned in the same way on three different spaceships is almost zilch, so this confirms that it's water and hydroxyl, Pieters said.
"There's just no question that it's there," Pieters said. "It's unequivocal."
Scientists testing lunar samples returned to Earth by astronauts did find traces of water, but they had figured it was contamination from moisture in Earth air, Pieters said.
Three scientists who were not part of the team of discoverers said the conclusion makes sense, with Arizona State University's Ron Greeley using the same word as Pieters: unequivocal.
Lunar and Planetary Institute senior scientist Paul Spudis called it exciting and said it raises the logical question: Where did that water come from?
Pieters figures there are three possibilities: It came from comets or asteroids that crashed into the moon, those crashes freed up trapped water from below the surface, or the solar wind carries hydrogen atoms that binds with oxygen in the dirt. That final possibility is the one that Sunshine and Pieters both prefer.
If it is the solar wind, that also means that other places without atmosphere in our solar system, such as Mercury or asteroids, can also have bits of water, Sunshine said.
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Source :: It's not lunacy, probes find water in moon dirt
Here are the results...
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MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin impacts on the moon's surface early Friday in a search for water ice. Scientists will analyze data from the spacecraft's instruments to assess whether water ice is present.
The satellite traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic 113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the moon's south pole. The spacecraft was launched June 18 as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"The LCROSS science instruments worked exceedingly well and returned a wealth of data that will greatly improve our understanding of our closest celestial neighbor," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The team is excited to dive into data."
In preparation for impact, LCROSS and its spent Centaur upper stage rocket separated about 54,000 miles above the surface of the moon on Thursday at approximately 6:50 p.m. PDT.
Moving at a speed of more than 1.5 miles per second, the Centaur hit the lunar surface shortly after 4:31 a.m. Oct. 9, creating an impact that instruments aboard LCROSS observed for approximately four minutes. LCROSS then impacted the surface at approximately 4:36 a.m.
"This is a great day for science and exploration," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The LCROSS data should prove to be an impressive addition to the tremendous leaps in knowledge about the moon that have been achieved in recent weeks. I want to congratulate the LCROSS team for their tremendous achievement in development of this low cost spacecraft and for their perseverance through a number of difficult technical and operational challenges."
Other observatories reported capturing both impacts. The data will be shared with the LCROSS science team for analysis. The LCROSS team expects it to take several weeks of analysis before it can make a definitive assessment of the presence or absence of water ice.
"I am very proud of the success of this LCROSS mission team," said Daniel Andrews, LCROSS project manager at Ames. "Whenever this team would hit a roadblock, it conceived a clever work-around allowing us to push forward with a successful mission."
The images and video collected by the amateur astronomer community and the public also will be used to enhance our knowledge about the moon.
"One of the early goals of the mission was to get as many people to look at the LCROSS impacts in as many ways possible, and we succeeded," said Jennifer Heldmann, Ames' coordinator of the LCROSS observation campaign. "The amount of corroborated information that can be pulled out of this one event is fascinating."
"It has been an incredible journey since LCROSS was selected in April 2006," said Andrews. "The LCROSS Project faced a very ambitious schedule and an uncommonly small budget for a mission of this size. LCROSS could be a model for how small robotic missions are executed. This is truly big science on a small budget."
For more information about the LCROSS mission, including images and video, visit:
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Source :: NASA Spacecraft Impacts Lunar Crater in Search for Water Ice
Who actually saw the moon "bombing"? |
