Slashdot Mirror
Personalized Moon Crash
Ich Bin Zu writes "Do you want to create your own crater on the moon? CNN has an article about a company putting a personalized moon crash for sale on ebay. The bid opens with $6 million which will enable the highest bidder to stuff up to 10kg worth of stuff on a space craft and lob it to the moon. The condition of the cargo is not guaranteed as it crashes on the moon at 4000 mph."
Auction is at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=45046&item=3808751242&rd=1
The kilogram is a measure of mass, not weight, and therefore does not rely on the force of gravity.
Hell, give me the $6 million and I'll get rid of your 10kg of junk. What a waste. It's the kind of people who buy SUVs for their daily commute that are behind these sorts of things.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
Why would anyone shoot a air-to-air missle at a building. If you're going to make gratuitous slams on the military at least know what you're talking about.
The company is Orbital Development.
Gregory Nemitz is an interesting character. I am a little skeptical about the deal since you are purchasing a "project" and not an actual mission. So there are very few guarantees attached, and you have limited authority of the project.
I think Nemitz's more interesting project is the most credible attempt to assert ownership over an extraterrestrial body. Specifically, he is asserting his claim over the near earth asteroid Eros.
On his website you can see legal correspondence between him and NASA as he gives them an invoice for a parking fee for their NEAR spacecraft that crash landed on the asteroid. Also available is his explanation of what he is doing and why he is doing. A very interesting read, and it gives some in-depth analysis of the nature of property ownership.
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wildmage
Memoirs of a Mad Scientist
Good question. 4000 mph ~= 1800mps, KE = .5(10)(1,800)^2 = 16 megajoules. Perfectly elastic collision gets you a PE = 16 MJ = 10 kilograms * 9.8/6 * height, so the height would be...damn, a million meters? That's pretty friggin' high.
That was by far the funniest post I've read on slashdot in a while. Until, of course, I started to think about it scientifically. (which I tend to do with all jokes eventually).
Unfortunately, with the lack of pressure, the water would instantly vaporize as soon as it got a glimpse of sunlight, and any debris ejected from a collision at that speed will likely not return to the moon's surface due to the low gravity. I doubt it would have any long-term impact on traces for microbial life, with the exception of ejecting any native microbes off the moon during impact.
It's easy to orbit the sun (heck, you're doing that right now), but it's pretty hard to actually hit it.
Let's say you're a satellite orbiting earth and you want to hit the earth's surface as soon as possible. What direction should you fire your thrusters? Assume current techology: you have relatively little thrust at your disposal.
Most people say, "fire the thrusters directly away from the earth!" This is actually wrong. It will make your orbit elliptical, but it would take a very long time to actually hit the earth. The best direction to fire is exactly against the direction of your forward motion, tangential to earth. Slow yourself down and let the earth's gravity take over.
The moon orbits the earth at 2300 MPH (1 km/s), but orbits the earth at 67,000 MPH (30 km/s). This should give some idea as to the difference in scale. There are more difficulties too, mostly because you're trying to boost yourself UP to the moon but DOWN to the sun.
Of course, you could also shoot yourself toward another planet and get a gravity assist toward the sun. That would take a lot less energy but a lot more time.
I remember a Robert Heinlien story where there was a commercial venture to the moon. At one point they mentioned selling a cola company a way to mark the moon with ash. the result would be a giant advertisement in the sky forever. Of course they then sold the compeating cola company the rights to be the pop that kept the moon clean. They got money and were able to not carry the extra weight of moon-fireworks.
From what I understand it actually takes more energy to send something from Earth orbit into the Sun than it would take to send the object on a path to escape the solar system. This is because in order to crash into the Sun you first have to cancel out the velocity imparted by being in Earth's orbit around the Sun in the first place. However if you wanted to leave the solar system you would simply add some velocity to your orbit around the Sun and this would kick you to an orbit further from the Sun.
In other words the quantity of energy needed to lower your orbital velocity to zero relative to the Sun would be less than the amount you need to add to escape from orbiting the Sun. This means that it probably takes less energy to send something to the Moon than it would take to send it to the Sun.
According to my quick calculations it would take a velocity of approximately 42 km/s to escape the solar system from Earth's orbit. Earth imparts a velocity of approximately 30 km/s to any object which is in a similar orbit around the sun. This means that you would need to either slow down by 30 km/s to hit the sun (30 km/s - 0 km/s) or you would need to speed up by 12 km/s to leave the solar system (42 km/s - 30 km/s).
Strange, but true - it actually takes less energy to leave the solar system than it is to crash into the sun from Earth orbit. This, of course, is not counting stuff like orbital slingshots around other planets and such which could decrease the energy needed for both crashing the Sun and leaving it.
Here's the site where I got some of the data I used for my calculations, as well as the formulas for escape velocity and such.
Sapere aude!
See here :Apollo 15 Passive Seismic Experiment
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.