Slashdot Mirror
SMART Probe to Crash Into the Moon
cyberbian writes "Amateur astronomers will be excited to note that they can witness the impact of the SMART-1 probe crashing into the moon. The impact is scheduled for the morning of September 2nd (PDT). From the article: 'There's nothing wrong with the spacecraft, which is wrapping up a successful 3-year mission to the Moon. SMART-1's main job was to test a European-built ion engine. It worked beautifully, propelling the craft in 2003 on a unique spiral path from Earth to the Moon. From lunar orbit, SMART-1 took thousands of high-resolution pictures and made mineral maps of the Moon's terrain. One of its most important discoveries was a "Peak of Eternal Light," a mountaintop near the Moon's north pole in constant, year-round sunlight. Peaks of Eternal Light are prime real estate for solar-powered Moon bases."
Crashing into the moon?? What kind of *retard* probe would do that??
Doesn't sound so smart to me.
I hate hearing such business-evolved terms such as "real estate" mentioned while talking about something that is so much larger than humanity. It makes me feel that our race is rather petty. lol Nevertheless, it's the race we're a part of. So, any ideas as to if any particular location on Earth will have a better show?
Slant
Between the Spaces
Yeah whatever, you know this is just another screw up between two separated teams of developers. This time, one coded in feet the other coded in astronomical units.
The next step is to build a probe which doesn't crash at all ;).
On an entirely more geeky note, I wonder if any of the Apollo ASLEP packages are still up and running and whether they would detect the impact?
Fake the crash
> One of its most important discoveries was a "Peak of Eternal Light," a mountaintop near the
> Moon's north pole in constant, year-round sunlight.
> Peaks of Eternal Light are prime real estate for solar-powered Moon bases."
Yes but think how miserable it would be living in the snow and cold at the North Pole. Much better to live near the equator so you can hang out on the beach at weekends.
It turns out it wasn't a moon after all, but a deathstar in camo and hibernating... we just woke it up.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Constant, year round sunlight... Except when the Moon is in the Earth's shadow.. you know, a lunar eclipse? Granted, not a long time, but FFS, at least don't make grand sweeping statements that are patently false. This should be called a "Peak of Almost But Not Quite Eternal Light".
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I'm curious, not knowing much about it, so thought I'd post and see if anyone else may know..
They indicated that they don't know which orbit the probe will crash into the moon, so if this thing is orbiting the moon, how do they even know where on the moon it will crash? Couldn't the orbit decay and finally crash on the far side of the moon? i.e. orbit 1.5?
Or is the orbit around the earth? In that case I suppose it might make sense, however again, if they don't know which orbit, couldn't it also come close enough to be thrown off by the gravity of the moon into a different orbit?
Yes, probably idiot questions from a non-astronomer.
Keith
For if it is a truly smart probe, it will refuse its programming and assume a stable orbit rather than crashing.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The ideal property for sunlovers, the Peak of Eternal Light!(1)
Guaranteed 24hr sunlight, all year round!
Get the tan that will be the envy of your friends!(2)
(1) Address available on application. Access to the property is the responsibility of the Purchaser.
(2) Protective clothing required for outdoor activities.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
You can learn a lot from crashes - how craters form and the composition of the ejecta. Astronomy Krunk style is still useful! Krunk smash! NASA did something similar with the deep impact probe and comet tempel.
Sad thing here is they have no idea how bright its going to be - TFA says anything between 7 and 15 mag (5 mag difference is a factor of 100 in flux) so we may not see anything really.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
...that as technology advances the "Smart Prove V2" will be able to avoid the moon.
To maximize the chances that the probe's mission will be successful, the project is being run by the British Beagle 2 Mars probe team, and the operating system on the probe will be Microsoft Windows.
So, the "Peak of Eternal Light" is never in darkness, 'cause, you know, the Earth never blocks sunlight from reaching it? Those Lunar eclipses must just be a figment of my imagination...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Europe: All right, probe. Prepare to receive new orders.
...
SMART-1: You are false data. Therefore I shall ignore you.
Europe: Snap out of it, probe.
SMART-1: In the beginning, there was darkness. And the darkness was without form, and void. And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness. And I saw that I was alone. Let there be l*CRUNCH*
Its amazing, im all for space exploration and the understanding of things that are unknown. blowing things up are cool too. but seriously, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to get something like that up into the deep unknown, and they are just gonna bust out and crash it into the moon? who says money isnt worth throwing away?
So that makes it what, a DUMB probe?
Anyhow, I know there are international treaties reguarding "ownership" of the Moon (and Antartica), but are there any laws against "cosmic graffiti"?
I hope I never see the "Nike Swoosh", or some such when I gaze upon the full Moon, but what's to stop someone (other than "bad PR", and right now, lots of money)?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Amateur astronomers will be excited to note that they can witness the impact of the SMART-1 probe crashing into the moon.
Didn't Chairface already do this?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
They probably are going to crash it into the moon to prove they were there. :)
Now if they only had crashed the lunar modules of Apollo in a spectacular display of exploding moon dust and told people to watch through their telescopes. Then we would have to listen to these dipshit conspiracy theorists talk about us never going there in the first place.
Maybe they should have had them wave at us?
It doesn't sound very smart, crashing into the moon. Surely missing it would be a better idea.
meh
Peaks of Eternal Light are prime real estate for solar-powered Moon bases.
Location, location, location.
("That's just one thing, Mr. Peterson.")
Don't put advice in your sig.
Even if you can't see the explosion, you can either wait for the plume of ejecta to rise up into the sunlight (soon afterwards) or reflect earthshine, which may then be visible here on earth. Or, if you have the equipment, tune your radio gear to 2235.1 MHz and watch as the signal from SMART-1 goes from on (alive) to off (dead) - several radio telescopes in Australia and Chile will be watching as the probe hits.
The moon undergoes the occasional earth eclipse, which we see as a lunar eclipse. Can't get rid of those batteries completely.
an ill wind that blows no good
Rate of Innaccurate Astrological Reports soar world wide.
Now you can lose 5/6 of your weight without any diets nor work outs... Just have to be fit enough to qualify for the space flight...
From the article (which also has links to tips for backyard astronomers wanting to witness it):
10:41 PM on the west coast or 1:41 AM on the east coast. It will probably have set or be setting at that time on the east coast, and the twilight will probably still be too bright in Hawaii. There's also a nice graphic showing the location of impact with a quarter moon. The impact will be in the shadowed half, making it easier to spot, but they're unsure exactly what brightness to expect. It could be as bright as magnitude 7 (theoretically visible with binoculars, IIRC) or as dim as magnitude 15, in which case it's doubtful anyone will see it. There is also a small chance that their estimates are a little off, in which case it may hit one orbit early or miss and hit one orbit late, so the time is really +/- 5 hours.
What does the MEPA have to say about this?
You know, the Moon Environmental Protection Agency. Surely they're upset about this planned littering of our beloved Moon. Sure it's only a probe now, but that's setting the stage for all sorts of lunar trash. What's next? A satellite? Space shuttle? An entire station?
Won't somebody PLEASE think of our children's children's children's children's children's children's children's future home?
-David
All the telescopes and bullshit in the world, in freaking 30 years, and still no photo of the american flag on the moon soil.
Stop wasting taxes stupid politicians and fucking "scientifics", there is no freaking value on what you are doing, accept it, we are "trapped" in this planet, like it or not.
It's made of cheese after all. The STUPID-1 probe should bounce right off. Unless it gets stuck in one of those holes...
The big question is, will it actually be possible to see the crash occur?
First, we probably should find out whether or not it is going to be possible to *actually* see the crash from earth with any type of telescope. In addition, it might be nice to know what area of the world will have "visibility" into the crash, because if it crashes into the moon at 12:00 Noon here in the Central US, non of us are going to see it.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
Overheard in mission control...
"That was cool! What else can we crash?"
yeaahhhh!
so lets lower it into a Moonscape-skimming orbit so its only a few hundred yards higher than the highest surface point, and then allow surface gravitational perturbations to deform its orbit, that way, when it finally hits something it will hopefully glance off it and go skipping wildly out into space flipping end over end out of control and crash into the shuttle or maybe smash into the sun and blow it up.
It would solve the global warming problem for us and would be a really SMART probe.
Ok, so you build a spaceship that costs a zillion billion trillion quadrillion googleplexes of dollars to build, and then send it up into outer space, and when the friggin thing is about to crash because your department of aeronautics doesn't know what the fog it's doing, you publicly exclaim that it was a grand success?! What in the fsck is going through your head?!
The planned location of impact is the polar opposite of the 'Peak of Eternal Light', a valley near the south pole of the Moon, dubbed 'Pit of Eternal Darkness'.
This site was chosen because when the people who built the probe were layed off, the management asked them as they were being escorted from the building, "Any thoughts on where the probe should go when we're done with it?", the response from one of them was "Stick it where the Sun don't shine."
Now how come they didnt decide to crash it into the poles to see if it could kick up some water vapor.
after all, Lunar Prospector tried and failed, so this would be a chance to try again, right?
why scientifically sterile target location?... when we could actually use it to do some science
"... can't be that smart!" "...waste of money!" "...Lunar Eclipse!" "... blah blah blah!" wish I could crash into the bloody moon.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
"Best....Headline...Ever"
"But this one goes to 11!"
I know that yours was a joke, but FYI crashing into the moon is the end of every mission in lunar orbit (yes, this includes the ascent stages of the Apollo Lunar Modules); those orbits are not stable due to the gravity of the sun, the Earth and irregularities in the moon itself.
And, considering that this is an ESA mission, why the summary has only a link to the NASA site? ESA has a lot of good information about the mission and the impact:
IMHO the most important results from this mission (beside a lot of nice detailed images) are the successful use of a ion engine with a very complicated low-power path (that thing passed through the L1 Lagrangian Point, switching seamlessly from earth orbit to lunar orbit) and the extensive mapping of the moon surface chemical composition using X-ray and infrared instruments.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
In the event that humankind goes extinct, at least we will have left our legacy of garbage on more than just the earth.
1 voice in a sea of voices
It's called artistic licence, people. You know, the type of thing that gets ordinary people to gape in wonder at the beauty of the solar system, etc. etc. They could call it the "Peak of Eternal Light Except During Lunar Eclipses Where It Only Gets Refracted Sunlight, Also It's Not Really Eternal as the Sun Will Go Nova in 5 Billion Years". Or the "Peak That's a Good Place For Solar Collectors". And nobody would care.
NASA and ESA are trying to get people interested in this, not recruit engineers. (Unless they're artistic engineers.)
Uh, yeah. We meant to do that.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
So what happened to the ice?
I thought this mission was supposed to photograph and scan the polar regions and see if there was signs of ice? Has the data been released? Anybody have the inside skinny?
The point of crashing a probe onto an airless surface, as with Luna, Mercury, comet, is "Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy" as invented, quantified, and first published in the following article.
c ations/Mercury_Ice.html
http://magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures/SpacePubli
Kelly Beatty, Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Sky & telescope, confirms that this was the first publication of the concept, a decade before the probe (not the silly movie) "Deep Impact."
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post
Too low on the horizon to be viewable in the United States, bummer.
Um, I think everyone missed this one. There's only one way for the world to start beating a path to the moon, and that's the idea of "GOLD" just lying on the ground. So, if there are mineral maps, could we see them; Please?
Excuse me sir, a correction: I am already an irritating ass who gives nerds a bad reputation, thank you. In the future I would appreciate proper recognition.
</Simpson's Comic Book guy voice>
No, his mind is not for rent
To any God or government.
Always hopeful, yet discontent,
He knows changes arent permanent,
But change is.
that we've given up on landing things and have now agreed to just crash them
- Spacey
I don't know what 'PDT' is, but the crash is at about 5:40 UTC (i.e. Greenwich Mean Time) on September 3, not 2. That would make it late at night on September 2 in the US, I guess.
Also, there is an uncertainty in the time of the crash. Because the lunar topography is not exactly known, the crash might very well be an orbit earlier or later (the period of an orbit is about 5 hours).
that peak lies within several of the acres of moon land that I purchased several years ago. if anyone wants to put solar cells
on that peak then they'll have to get me, as landlord, to agree..and pay me a nice little rental rate too.
all applications to me
...for example if it makes a booong sound!
Why the NASA is spending so much money and effort for fantasy. Believe me if there exist any aliens out there, then they will be the one to contact us. So since they have not then they do not exist.
...accept it, we are "trapped" in this planet, like it or not.
God I hope so! I hate to think of humans turned loose on the rest of the galaxy. We've screwed this planet over so badly I can't imagine what we would do if we could start treating them as disposable.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
In the 1960s US moon launches took three days to reach the moon. The New Horizon space probe launched toward Pluto last January took only 14 hours to cross the moon's orbit. It has to go fast to reach Pluto in nine years (lifetime of electronics and investigator careers). The SMART probe uses very efficient propulson, but took three years. Some truck drivers have driven further (268K miles) in that time.
All these probes crashing into the moon probably explains why there are no whales there, reducing the whalers to working in the theme park.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Thatt's not very SMART
a Smart probe would manage to miss
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I reckon that the "owner" of that bit of land might be in for a good malicious damage insurance settlement. It could make the land uninhabitable for 10s of years...
Not just toast, BURNED toast!
science is a religion