EU Craft Successfully Hits The Moon

An anonymous reader writes "SMART-1 has hit the Moon , just as planned and — even better — the impact threw out a bright infrared that was seen by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. There's an animation of the images grabbed by the telescope. Scientists now hope to analyse the chemistry of the rock ejected by the crash. If only you could dump old cars in such a useful way."

Comments

DUMB-1

[peter303]

Take three years to get there, then crash it :-)

Re:DUMB-1

[delinear]

You may scoff, but there is a strong scientific reasoning behind this. Once we terraform the moon and have a society living up there, pretty soon that society is going to collapse. By hiding these scientific treasures for them to find in the distant future, we can potentially kick-start a resurgent scientific age and save ourselves a lot of trial and error.

We should also think about sticking some dinosaur fossils up there as well, just to get some heated religious/evolutionary debates underway.

How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon?

[Eevee]

Whoops, we're still in orbit. Let's try hitting it again!

Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon?

[Carthag]

Duh you just reel in the string while spinning! Obviously what they wanna do is attach a string between the moon and the object they want to hit the moon and then reel that in. Easy as pie!

aliens beware

[legoburner]

Mars, Comets, Titan and now the Moon. Is there anything we can't smash stuff into?

So....

[chill]

Was there a good chance that it would miss? Was there the possibility of an "unsuccessful" crash?

Re:So....

[tttonyyy]

Was there a good chance that it would miss? Was there the possibility of an "unsuccessful" crash?

Ah, you must've read THHGTTG (shameless paste follows):

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

ESA are working on that last bit.

and TheMoon...

[rozz]

...was not available for comment at press time

Look out NASA...

[patio11]

... your days at being the world's only celestial-body-impacting-space-agency are over!

Odd Differences eh?

[agent dero]

so, let me get this straight...

European Space Agency gets their kicks by slamming into stuff...

American Space Agency gets their kicks by not getting off the ground...

I think the tide is starting to turn in the new space race :-P

Hm

[Ellidi T]

The Moon Successfully Hits EU Craft.

Mapping the surface

[Stupert]

So "SMART-1 orbited the Moon more than 2000 times and mapped the mineralogy of the lunar surface" before it was successfully crashed into the surface. Scientists expect the ejecta from the crash to settle over up to a square kilometer of the impact site. Do we now need to send up another probe to remap the surface which was disturbed?

The animation

[isaacklinger]

Putting a link to a 3.5 meg GIF, on slashdot's front page. Yeah. For those who didn't get a chance to watch it, at 5:42:15:93 there was a round white flash over a grey rectangle scattered with black dots.

for thosethat cant see the gif

[Anonymous Coward]

******
******
******

Then:

******
**  **
******

Ion Drive Reporting

[krell]

"What I found particularly nice about this report was that in a "mainstream" news outlet there was no dumbing-down of the technology, such as the ion drive."

I'm looking forward to Fox New's report tonight where they illustrate the ion-drive part by showing a pic of Darth Vader's TIE fighter.

Ahem

[CrazyJim1]

Someone shoots the moon and then people break out telescopes to watch it.

That's Nothing!

[MrSteveSD]

I am quite proud that my country, Britain, managed to successfully crash a probe into Mars.

Re:IS THIS AN INVASION?

[wasted time]

Is Christiane Amanpour on her way to the moon?

One can only hope.

Re:IS THIS AN INVASION?

[Zaatxe]

Are we under attack? Moon is soveign US territory (we planted the flag first -- end of story).

Oh, did you? Can NASA provide some original video tape or film reel with the Moon landing to prove what you claim?

For some reason I have this strong urge..

[D4MO]

..to buy the moon. Huh??

i cant beleive no one has asked..

[PenguSven]

did it run linux? :p

it was probably running windows, and the agencies involved just said "yeah, we uh... wanted it to crash. thats right.."