Slashdot Mirror
New Crater On Moon Caught On Video
From A Far Away Land writes "NASA has released a video clip of a meteorite striking the surface of the Moon. From the article: 'On May 2, 2006, a meteoroid hit the Moon's Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy -- that's about the same as 4 tons of TNT," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL.'"
Probably about 10 times more interesting but half as riveting as Girls Gone Wild.
On a side note: this is cool they managed to get a fairly clear video of this... however, why'd they convert it to a GIF image? [ewww..]
What's the bet they're show us more meteorites hitting the moon, so when we discover no evidance of the moon landing, they can blame it on being destroyed by meteorites? ;-)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
wait, I don't understand... how many joules are in a library of congress?
When it first loaded I thought, "where's the damn sound"?
Then I saw it was a gif...and thought, "why is it an animated picture and not a video with sound?"
Then I realized I needed more caffeine. Oops.
If a mere 10 inch meteor can create a 4 ton explosion then I don't think it would ever be a good idea to try to put a colony on the moon. If this kind of thing happens often, and the say it does, there would have to be a whole lot of protection for any structure we put on the moon. Or develope shields...
Eating the brains of your enemies does not make you smarter. But it's still fun.
Which terrorist group is NASA blaming ?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
...of that thing hitting us? Surly there had to be that chance of it missing the moon and running into earth right? Makes me wonder what else might be lurking around that could potentially miss the moon and collide with us.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Mentioned a fireball, but... no air, no fire, no fireball. Little bit underwhelmed.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
That's all well and good, but how many football fields was the impact?
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
are you asking or telling?
this is why you didn't get first post.. loser.. you suck at life.
NASA has released a video clip of its server being struck with 17 billion hits all at the same time.
"That's about the same as 4 tons of TNT, or an entire Slashdot community" says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL.
I am a leaf on the wind
What is 17 billion joules when mad earthlings have tried to Cyclops you?
Scientist have been trying to figure out when something big will hit. Imagine if what hit the moon hit a major city... I'd definitely rather see my tax dollars spent on a project to deter meteorites as opposed to seeing money thrown around with people crying "Al Qaeda" anytime.
Infiltrated dot Net
hehe... I love how this got modded "1, Insightful"
Is it just me, or did NASA just get Slashdotted ?
/. NASA ?!
How the hell do you
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
.. looks like they'll have to land their probes normally now. Or at least, they can send a probe to the new crater to see if there is ice below ground.
I've seen Wile e. Coyote blow stuff up on the moon lots of time and it looks completely different from that obviously faked footage.
- who modded "flamebait"...
;-) <-- huh?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I said it in another thread - but I do love it when we get to see actual video of astronomical footage.
:]
Don't get me wrong, I love astronomy and the photographs gleaned from it are simply the most profound images ever seen by mankind. Please understand the significance of what I mean there.
But when we can actually see these objects in motion, in-vivo so to speak, it's just so remarkable!
I only hope that when the next generation space telescopes are in orbit that they will be able to capture the streams of x-rays shooting from the poles of neutron stars exciting the gas of the surrounding nebula like a gigantic cosmic northern lights.
I *heart* astronomy
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
The moon is big, really, really big. Colonies are small, really, really small.
Douglas Adams lives!
Is there a good reason why this happened on May 2, and only now they are publishing an article about this? Not that I've even been able to see the video yet. NASA can put a man on the moon but they can't keep a server running more than 10 minutes before getting slashdotted.
... the Bush administration is talking about Iran hiding weapons of mass destruction in space, and that something must be done about it.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be: for ever and ever. Amen.
The significance for the monks was that the Bible was telling them that the earth and heavens were unchanged since Creation and would remain unchanged forever after. Here was evidence that what their faith was telling them wasn't true. Sagan said the event caused quite a bit of problems for the monastery as the monks tried to reconcile their faith and reality.
If anyone knows anything more about the event Sagan was talking about, I'd really like to hear it. I've often wondered if the crater it left has been identified.
They've proved us right!
You can think of energy in a kazillion different ways...so why is TNT the first thing to come to mind? Unless NASA is mad about blowing shit up, that is?
Slashdotters are always right 90% of the time.
It's part of the closing scenes in the table tennis game I just saw advertised at the top of this page.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
It's a singularity jettisoned from a deccelerating spaceship as a gift to the earth. It's not an attack, don't shoot them! They come in peace but their voices are garbled by water!!!
After your 3rd coffee you realised that sound won't travel too well in the vacuum of space.
"Caught on Video" makes it sound like something dirty was happening. "Hot meteorite on Moon action! All caught on video!"
NASA can put a man on the moon but they can't keep a server running more than 10 minutes before getting slashdotted.
Well, let's not forget that NASA is a space agency, not an ISP.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't see how they messed up.
Think about it, if NASA would have made an alert about that thing, there would have been widespread panic, it would have still hit the moon, & NASA would be toast.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This crater is actually the biggest found in years. The last lunar crater NASA scientists thought they discovered turned out to be a case of mistaken identity - one of the telescopes was accidentally zoomed in on the face of a 15 year old local pizza delivery boy. Apparently, this kinda thing happens all the time.
Yes, the agencies monitoring our skies should alert the media every time a huge, ten-inch rock comes hurtling toward Earth. Thank goodness we now have actual evidence of interplanetary matter actually hitting to moon, so we can officially worry that they're not warning us of our imminent doom from... things small enough to disintegrate in our atmosphere.
Oh... never mind.
"...but our theory is simply that that no one has created a loud enough sound. And that's where we come in, because our band is truly, pofoundly loud!"
--Obscure reference (a virtual beer to anyone who gets it)
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Ummm, 4 tons TNT equivalent? Who cares. One of these hits us daily and we don't seem to notice.
20 kiloton airbursts (5000 times bigger, think Hiroshima) happen annually and we don't notice those.
The 20 megaton airbursts (5 million times bigger, think Tunguska) that happen every hundred years or so, those we notice, some of the time, maybe.
It's somewhere around 20 gigatons (5 billion times bigger) that we need to start worrying that more than a couple people might get hurt.
Support SETI@home
Here's the cache; it's still pretty fast:
Main article
Higher resolution gif
The USAF dropped two 500lb bombs on Zarqawi's house. Even if you were to make the extremely conservative assumption that 1000lb of today's munitions is equivalent to 1000lbs of TNT, you would have to say that Zarqawi was killed by a pro-rated NASA estimate of 17 billion / 4 tons * .5 tons = 2.125 billion joules on one man's head. That is bad ass!
Zarqawi Getting Blasted Video
This is my sig.
That is actually pretty interesting "Trophy", I love the 'minimal collateral damage' point on that video, makes me want to be there when some guy is selling it to the military etc. :P
They're *real* small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"You can think of energy in a kazillion different ways...so why is TNT the first thing to come to mind?"
;-)
Well, you've seen someone blow up a stick of dynamite in a movie, right? Using TNT as a measure of magnitude is NASA's way of putting things in layman's terms, I think. Joe Sixpack may not know what a joule is, for instance, and how many joules is "a lot".
Personally, I don't think it's a very good way of simplifying the magnitude unless you have actually seen TNT go off in real-life. When you see dynamite or TNT blow up in the movies there's always fire and smoke - that's pyrotechnics doing it's magic with slow-burning liquids like gasoline (with sound effects later added on, in reality pyrotechnics makes an extremely unimpressive sound - just a small poff). A "real" explosion is a quick flash, and a single stick of dynamite exploding would be a lot like looking at the flash of a camera if it werent for the sound and pressure that clued you in on the rest.
Here are some "fun facts" to those curious about the anatomy of an explosion, and one those things that effectively ruined Hollywood "effects" for me. Basically, if you see fire and black smoke - it's pyrotechnics and safe chemicals. If you see a flash - it's a sign of a real explosive. On film a real explosion is not as impressive because it happens way too fast.
The fun part: Explosives are, in essence, just burning substances. The faster it burns, however, the more powerful the explosive becomes. Imagine a candle stick. It burns slow and is relatively harmless, right? Well, if that candle burned a couple of thousand times faster it could potentially become as powerful as a stick of dynamite. What we experience as an "explosion" is when a substance burns so fast and consumes oxygen at such a fast rate that it creates atmospheric pressure through expansion/compression powerful enough to go "boom" and shatter any surrounding materials. Another fun fact is that, in theory, a traditional "burning" explosive would not go off in a vaccuum (that's assuming the explosive itself didn't contain some small amount of oxygen that would allow it to burn, can anyone confirm this?).
As for NASA, TNT is what one might classify as an industrial explosive (stable, not easy to ignite and thus safe to use, which is why the military likes it, at least in my country) so it's probable that many people have seen it go off at some point in their lives, maybe at a construction site? which is yet another reason why NASA may have used it as "layman's terms".
It's important to note that an atomic bomb is a whole different story and is not a burning explosive. A nuclear explosion realeases energy in an entirely different way (If anyone knows differently, please speak up and correct me on this or perhaps just to explain the anatomy of it. I would personally be interested in hearing about it). Meteorite impacts are yet another type of explosion where the release of energy is caused by the collision. The one thing all explosions do have in common though is the release of energy.
Anyway, you may already have known all this but it's still fun to explain and think about
(Disclaimer: In the marines my job was to blow stuff up, so I've studied the subject enough to not get myself or anyone else killed, this was years ago, however, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details but I still think I got most of it right)
The crab nebula in motion:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive
Herbig-Haro object 47 in the Orion Nebula, look at this! This is similiar to the "Pillars of creation in M16.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HH47_animation
V838 expanding in Monoceros:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030402.html
The ebb and flow of clouds around Jupiters Red Spot:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001123.html
With no atmosphere on Moon, there is no heating up. No fireball. I would expect some rocks and dust to be thrown out from the impact crater, but no light.
Arrrggh! They gonna crash into the sun!
If you recall - MoonBase Alpha was underground not only because of meteor strikes, but because of nuclear waste explosions, and some drunken Eagle pilot crashing his shuttle into the moon at the start of the episode every week from 1975 to 1977.
You can't just futz around waiting for the next spectacular space crash set to violins, you have to take basic precautions.
Trust me - I know - I saw it on TV!
Crater face! Crater face!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I hope that was a joke...
But it happened 43 days ago. Disappointing quality of the media.
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
Al Qaeda is attempting to bomb the moon permanently into a crescent!
A space rock about 10 inches hits Sea of Clouds with force about the same as 4 tons of TNT
See! Its not about the size of the rock, its about the motion in the sea.
Is NASA using cellphone cameras now?
2.5mb of MJPEG noise reencoded as GIF to show off 5x5 pixel spot?
He named the crater in the documentary. As another reply already said, it is the spectacular crater Giordano Bruno, which I think is the only crater large enough to be seen by the naked eye from Earth. (At least, the dust rays radiating from it can be seen.) It can even be seen in Slashdot's "Moon" icon, as a bright spot in the middle near the bottom.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I watched the movie but there was no sound. Anyone else have this problem? ;)
This is a completely offtopic comment but it has to be said. You don't know how correct you are in your comment. I'm one of those non-fatties and let me tell you, trying to find a pair of pants in my size (30" waist) is something close to impossible.
It matters not what store, time of year or any other combination you can think of, the dearth of clothes in general that I can wear is extremely small. For example, there were early Fathers Day sales this past weekend (June 10th & 11th). I went to two local malls and found zero items in my size. Apparently guys can have a 38" waist and a 30" inseam (i.e. an inverted pear shape) but can't be thin and svelte.
It's not my fault I have a high metabolism (always have) and can eat most people under the table. Nor is it my fault that I'm beyond the age where my body is supposed to gain weight and lose hair but has done neither.
All I can say is if I should ever be able to buy a clothing store the first order of business will be to fire the buyers. They're idiots. They have no concept of what consumers want in either sizes or style.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It's not "on fire", it's 17 billion Joules worth of electrons screaming "wheee!" as they jump back down through their energy levels (I love Forrest Mims' smiley electrons). There's no air in an incandescent lightbulb, either.
I'm not exactly thin (okay, I'm fat), but even I am amazed at the sizes avaliable at stores. With a 40 inch waist (32 inch inseam), I am at about 220 lbs. How big do you have to be to fill out 58-inch pants?!?! A little chubby is one thing, but at least I can sit in normal chairs and fit through doors.
/usr/games/fortune
1. Post interesting video of meteor impact on moon ..... wait
2. Government website slashdotted
3. ??
4. Prof.. no, no
1. Post interesting video of meteor impact on moon
2. Government website slashdotted
3. Claim cyber-terrorists attacking website, crippling it, melting servers....
4. Increase per anum budget under guise of Dept. of Homeland Security
5. Profit!!
AHA!!!!!!!!! I FOUND IT!!!!!! YEAAAAAA
uh... when you crash that much material that fast into the moon, you get vaporization. Energy, baby. Energy. Manifested as light.
Well it seems we /.'d NASA. Please, what ever you do, go to the NASA during a shuttle mission.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
For some reason I first read that as Metroid.
Now that would have been some interesting news.
I think I need to go wake up now.
I mean it's just a flash of light right? Maybe it's an object being launched. From the magnitude of the light they can estimate the power of the "impact". Could we use the same info to calculate the payload of a rocket being launched?
Don't you all realize that this means the Martians have colonized our moon?!? The invasion has begun!
;->
Ha, my girlfriend's sister has a startup discount clothing business, and she keeps complaining that her supplier usually sends her 30" pants that few people buy.
No, they know what sells.
Learn to sew if you don't like it. Or hire a tailor.
My great aunt, who is not in her mid-90s, is 4'10". There was no 'petite' section back when she was a young adult. The only clothes in her size were girls' clothes. So she learned to sew and made all of her own clothes. She also designed and sewed clothes for others, including mother-of-the-bride dresses and wedding dresses and made her living that way. With her experience making her own clothes without a pattern, she became very good at coming up with original, flattering designs for a wide variety of women's shapes.
The moral of the story is that if you percieve a hole in the market, fill it, either for yourself or for everyone. If it's really a hole, it'll soon be filled. If not, it's just you (but if it is just you, you'll have made what you need for yourself and spared us your whining).
layman's terms don't work on /. since the vast majority of /.ers are not laid men.
Just give them the measurements in volkswagens. They'll understand.
The full force of the Slashdot effecting hitting NASA's server.
The rock? It's just a cover.
If "it" doesn't strictly refer to the physical composition of the earth and cosmos, then the poster you responded to has a valid question.
Well, hard to tell, since psalm 119 doesn't say what the original poster think it says.
I think, though, he meant: Ecclesiastes 1:9 (English Standard Version)
Which does refer specifically to the physical world.
You can't take the sky from me...
With no atmosphere on Moon, there is no heating up. No fireball. I would expect some rocks and dust to be thrown out from the impact crater, but no light.
Piezoluminescence does not require an atmosphere. There's also the possibility of an impact mixing components of the crust and the impact body which react emitting light.
From TFA:
"A student member of our team, Nick Hollon of Villanova University, spotted the flash."
I'm guessing that simple sentence in the article made Mr. Hollon's day. Or even month. ;-)
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
If you have a screen larger than 800x600, you might want to use Opera to view the animated Gif. You can use Opera's Zoom feature to zoom the browswer window and image to full screen. Since Firefox doesn't have page zoom, you have to use the image zoom, which is reset each refresh. Unfortunately, by the time you use the cursor to select a larger zoom setting, the "video" is over.
-l