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."
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 sooner we stop thinking about the moon as some mystical magical pixie home where ancient one-eyed green cheese eating creatures hide from our attempts to photograph them, and start thinking about in terms of real estate with a long-ass trip to the beach.... ... the sooner we will advance off the planet and into our own solar system with any kind of manned progress.
The moon is not a rainforest we have to save so that we can continue to breathe. We should avoid blowing it up, but other than that, it's a big hunk of rock we just haven't put to good use yet.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
I hate hearing such business-evolved terms such as "real estate"
Real estate is not a business evolved term, in fact it's rather the opposite. It's a fuedalism evolved term.
"Real" means "royal" and "estate" means "status"; real estate is that property, status; held by royal grant, one's condition under the power of the king.
If you don't like the term applied to the moon; go complain to the King of the Moon.
KFG
Orbital decay only occurs when a satelite is within the atmosphere of the body it orbits. It's caused by air resistance sapping the satelite's orbital velocity.
Since the moon is essentially airless, this won't happen. You could (at least in theory) orbit as close to the moon as you like as long as your path doesn't smack into the side of a mountain. In practice, I'm not sure I'd want to risk it, but it's certainly not against the laws governing orbital mechanics.
Over extremely long time periods, you'd run into problems, since "essentially airless" is not quite the same as "totally airless" (even in deep space there is no true vacuum), but I suspect we'd be talking about decades at a minimum here.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
Overheard in mission control...
"That was cool! What else can we crash?"
I wonder if any of the Apollo ASLEP packages are still up and running and whether they would detect the impact?
The ALSEP packages were turned off remotely when the budget for collecting data ran out. That was Sep 30, 1977. Although the Apollo 14 ALSEP had failed a year and a half earlier, the others (A12, A15-17) were still going strong -- and still would be, the RTG power source having about a 90-year half life. (Well, barring hardware failure.)
Their seismometers did detect the impact of the S-IVB upper stages and LM ascent stages that were targeted at the Moon's surface. The SMART probe is much smaller so it would depend on how close it hit.
-- Alastair
How did such an ignorant statement get modded insightful?
What did you do, make the post then log in with a different name and mod yourself?
Even during a total eclipse, tha moon is not totally dark. Sunlight gets refracted towards the moon through the Earth's atmosphere. A mountain peak at the Moon's pole could indeed be in eternal light.
One thing that really irks me is people that base the validity of a statement on their personal assumptions. In the words of Adam Savage of Mythbusters: "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
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__()
That's when the low-paid lunar coders will sleep...
What you really want to worry about are the Solar Eclipses of the Moon, when the Sun passes between the Earth and the Moon...
-- My Weblog.