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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."
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
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.
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
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.
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