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New Crater On Moon Caught On Video

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the to-the-moon-alice dept.

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.'"

43 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Craters Gone Wild? by rramdin · · Score: 3, Funny

    Probably about 10 times more interesting but half as riveting as Girls Gone Wild.

    1. Re:Craters Gone Wild? by yorugua · · Score: 2

      Dundee says: That's no crater. This is a crater!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JHdYBet_4Q&eurl=ht tp://www.sosyalmekan.com/blog/index.php

  2. Conspiracy? by x2A · · Score: 2, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Conspiracy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You fool. They didn't fake the moon landing. They didn't have to. They travel there on a daily basis with technology reverse engineered from the Roswell crash. They are preparing us for additional "meteor" strikes which will actually be missiles designed to knock out secret alien and ex-soviet moon bases!

  3. Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    wait, I don't understand... how many joules are in a library of congress?

    1. Re:Obligatory by igny · · Score: 4, Funny

      Everyone knows that energy is calculated in BigMacs (229 of delicious kcal). That explosion was mere 17,743 BigMacs.

      --
      In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
    2. Re:Obligatory by kalpaha · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm sorry, but you're wrong! Everyone knows mars bars (278 kilocalories) is the real unit of explosion strength.
      Google does these kind of calculations very easily: enter
      17 billion joules / 278 kilocalories

      into google, and you will receive the answer:
      (17 billion joules) / (278 kilocalories) = 14 615.4587

      So the explosion was ~14615 mars bars.

    3. Re:Obligatory by mgblst · · Score: 2, Funny

      Or another way, a weekyl intake for the average American... just kidding, we all know that you are not all fatties.

  4. Where's the sound? by SamMichaels · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Where's the sound? by digitalchinky · · Score: 5, Funny

      Where is the kaboom? There was meant to be an earth shattering kaboom....

    2. Re:Where's the sound? by flood6 · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's no moon!

      --
      SEO Firefox Extension
  5. Colony on the moon by vldragon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Colony on the moon by FuturePastNow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think a meteorite striking a lunar base would be like shooting at an ant crawling on the side of a barn. From a mile away. With your eyes closed. Of course, the thing about random chance is that it's bound to happen eventually, but I don't think any astronauts will lose sleep over it.

      --
      Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
    2. Re:Colony on the moon by pembo13 · · Score: 2, Funny

      They'd just wake up dead.

      --
      "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
    3. Re:Colony on the moon by JerBear0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Call the Israelis. That Trophy system isn't quite a shield, but it sure looks like one on the video (wmv).

      --
      Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.
    4. Re:Colony on the moon by BAM0027 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I am not a physicist, but it seems like your statement is kinda naive. The fact is that the moon has practically no atmosphere to fend off particles of any size, so while this latest one was large enough to view from here, there _may_ be a large number of fast moving particles that could cause significant damage.

      We don't notice it here on Earth at all because we have miles of gas to buffer the surface from most projectiles. While it might still be a very slim chance, I think it might be more frequent than you think and more destructive than you expect.

    5. Re:Colony on the moon by Ex-MislTech · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Keep in mind not long ago a meteor hit Norway with the force of
      the Hiroshma bomb.

      Russia was hit about 100 years ago, the gulf of mexico millions of
      years ago, and their are many bollide impact sites still visible
      all over the earth .

      As for ways to protect a moonbase, the best way would be to make
      a mine, and have the base deep underground with multipe exit tunnels
      and redundant compartmentalization like newer US navy ships .

      Thus why the USS cole in yemen had a huge hole in its side but didnt sink,
      after the bombing by terrorists several years ago.

      A underground moonbase also would not experience the temperature extremes
      of the surface, and would reduce radiation to near zero .

      Ex-MislTech

      --
      google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
    6. Re:Colony on the moon by Killshot · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah.. it's a pretty bad idea to put a base on the moon and have it be exposed to meteors. The International Space Station is much better and totally immune from such threats.

    7. Re:Colony on the moon by shotfeel · · Score: 2, Informative

      And add to that they've just started watching for these, so impacts of this size are not all that uncommon. And I'm with you in assuming there are probably many more, smaller impacts that occur. Just a couple quotes to indicate frequency:

      During a telescope test last November 7th, Suggs and Swift recorded an explosion on their very first night of observing. A piece of debris from Comet Encke struck the plains of Mare Imbrium, making a crater about 3 meters wide."

      Now that regular monitoring has begun, Cooke's group has already found a second impact, the May 2nd event, in only 20 hours of watching.

      And that's for the small portion of the surface they're actually monitoring.

  6. Terrorists on the moon? by xkr · · Score: 5, Funny

    Which terrorist group is NASA blaming ?

    --
    I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
  7. "that's about the same as 4 tons of TNT" by zegebbers · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's all well and good, but how many football fields was the impact?

    --
    Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
    1. Re:"that's about the same as 4 tons of TNT" by DavidD_CA · · Score: 2, Funny

      What I wanna know.. is how many Libraries of Congress can fit into the new crater?

      --
      -David
  8. and in news just to hand... by Audent · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  9. Do it like they do on the Discovery channel... by packetmon · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've seen a documentary on the Discovery Channel about the possibility of a meteorite hitting earth pretty hard. Come to think of it, last week a meteorite struck finland. What's interesting is the United States Air Force has the following:

    6.7 Asteroid Mitigation System
    Brief Description
    The asteroid mitigation system protects the Earth/Moon system from earth-crossing objects (ECO) by either deflecting or fragmenting ECO they no longer pose a threat. Deflection could be accomplished using nuclear explosive devices.

    Capabilities
    Deflects or destroys objects in space having the size and trajectory to threaten the Earth/Moon system An Operational Analysis for Air Force 2025: An Application of Value-Focused Thinking to Future Air and Space Capabilities (page 135)

    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
    1. Re:Do it like they do on the Discovery channel... by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 2, Informative
      Imagine if what hit the moon hit a major city...
      I understand your point - anything large enough to make it through the atmosphere into a city could be mistaken for an attack by terrorists or perhaps another country. However, for a rock of this size TFA actually says:

      If a rock like that hit Earth, it would never reach the ground. "Earth's atmosphere protects us," Cooke explains. "A 10-inch meteoroid would disintegrate in mid-air, making a spectacular fireball in the sky but no crater." The Moon is different. Having no atmosphere, it is totally exposed to meteoroids. Even small ones can cause spectacular explosions, spraying debris far and wide.
      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
    2. Re:Do it like they do on the Discovery channel... by whoop · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Unfortunately, it is far more likely to have a bomb go off in a major city from terrorists than to be knocked in the head by a meteorite. Human behavior is far more unpredictable and imminent than a meteor large enough to survive burn through atmosphere and do significant damage going unnoticed by astronomers worldwide.

      Even then, do you want the fear that a meteor is going to kill you in 3 hours 45 minutes or to just live like a normal day, then kaboom?

      And I'd rather my tax dollars that do go to NASA be spent on colonization. Inventions, energy sources, etc used to sustain life on the Moon or Mars will get ported back to Earth and help us out in the immediate future.

    3. Re:Do it like they do on the Discovery channel... by NereusRen · · Score: 4, Informative
      Imagine if what hit the moon hit a major city...
      That small of an object (only 10 inches diameter?) would burn up in our atmosphere. It only struck so hard on the moon because there's nothing slowing it down before it hits the surface. I went over to the trusty Asteroid Impact Simulator for a quick comparison. The smallest size you can select is 1 meter in diameter, but here's what it has to say about a fairly average 1m projectile "hitting" earth:

              Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.27 x 10^11 Joules = 0.54 x 10-4 MegaTons TNT [note: the one that hit the moon only had 1.7 x 10^10 Joules of energy... less than one tenth of this hypothetical.]
              The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is less than 1 month.
              The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 49200 meters
              No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.

      We only need to be worried about meteors a few orders of magnitude larger.

      (Hell, TFA even explained that it would burn up, but I guess I can't expect anyone around here to know that...)
  10. Slashdotted ? by Joebert · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is it just me, or did NASA just get Slashdotted ?

    How the hell do you /. NASA ?!

    --
    Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
    1. Re:Slashdotted ? by Joebert · · Score: 2, Funny

      I see why funding may have been cut now, frivolous spending.

      --
      Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
  11. Re:So what are the odds by Gabrill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One Word: Atmosphere. It's why the Earth doesn't look like the Moon.

    --
    Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
  12. That is fake by SensitiveMale · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

  13. Re:So what are the odds by Eideewt · · Score: 4, Funny

    We should surround the Earth with a protective blanket of some sort to protect ourselves from such an event! Of course, it would need to be transparent and not inhibit our movement. I wonder if we could use gases for that purpose.

  14. Videos make astronomy more tangible and real by w33t · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  15. Sagan's account by jmichaelg · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Carl Sagan's documentary Cosmos, described an event that happened in the middle ages. Some monks were sitting outside one evening when a meteoroid hit the moon and caused a naked-eye visible fireball. Evidently the event lasted long enough for the entire monastary to see it. If this current one only lasted half a second, the one Sagan described must have been huge. Problem was that the event flew straight in the face of Psalm 119 which reads:

    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.

    1. Re:Sagan's account by canatech · · Score: 5, Informative

      Try this -

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_(crate r)

    2. Re:Sagan's account by letxa2000 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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.


      I've been surprised before, but on the face that sounds like hogwash. That a flash of light on the moon (when they didn't know what the moon was nor what the flash of light represented) that was visible for awhile and then disappeared would cause them to question their faith seems silly.

    3. Re:Sagan's account by Rimbo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I think the obvious answer is that getting from here

      As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be: for ever and ever.


      to here

      the Bible was telling them that the earth and heavens were unchanged since Creation and would remain unchanged forever after


      is a non sequitur... in context, the latter does not necessarily follow from the former.
  16. "Caught on Video" by GhaleonStrife · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Caught on Video" makes it sound like something dirty was happening. "Hot meteorite on Moon action! All caught on video!"

  17. Re:Thanks for leting us know Nasa , 4 weeks after. by Osiris+Ani · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Is this how we will be warned if one is heading to hit the earth ? After the fact ?

    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.

  18. Re:Thanks for leting us know Nasa , 4 weeks after. by SETIGuy · · Score: 2, Informative
    Is this how we will be warned if one is heading to hit the earth ? After the fact ? I don't understand we put so much money into that agency and yet they keep messing up. Come you rocket scentist get your game on.

    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
  19. Re:So what are the odds by Wheatin · · Score: 2, Informative

    While the atmosphere does break up some potential meteorites there are still quite a few impacts. The reason we don't see much evidence of this is that many hit the oceans, and the ones that do hit land are (relatively) quickly masked by natural erosion and vegetation. Plate tectonics can also break them up over time, and lava fills many of them in. The atmosphere plays a big part in these, I know, but the point is that the number of impacts between the moon and the Earth is not that different. It's just that the moon has been collecting them for billions of years and they're never worn away or covered.

  20. More astro movies. by deathcow · · Score: 3, Interesting


    The crab nebula in motion:
    http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1996/22/video/a

    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. gif

    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

  21. Quality by porneL · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is NASA using cellphone cameras now?
    2.5mb of MJPEG noise reencoded as GIF to show off 5x5 pixel spot?