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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."
Take three years to get there, then crash it :-)
Whoops, we're still in orbit. Let's try hitting it again!
This can only be seen as great news for the ion drive. SMART-1 spiralled around the Moon exactly as planned, and was targetted at the Sea of Excellence with utmost precision. Perhaps we'll be seeing more probes with tiny amounts of fuel in the near future...?
Mars, Comets, Titan and now the Moon. Is there anything we can't smash stuff into?
Warhammer forums
Was there a good chance that it would miss? Was there the possibility of an "unsuccessful" crash?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The dust is certainly interesting to study, but I should say the ion propulsion engine on board is also a very interesting development. Maybe further development/use of this engine will lead to faster/more frequent/lower-cost space missions than now. Good thing NASA is slating ion propulsion for future unmanned missions ... it would be interesting if Orion (or whatever that thing is called) can use ion propulsion once it clears Earth's gravitational force.
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
...was not available for comment at press time
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... your days at being the world's only celestial-body-impacting-space-agency are over!
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
so, let me get this straight...
:-P
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
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The Moon Successfully Hits EU Craft.
Ellidi
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?
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.
Here's the BBC story on this event. 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 am officially gone from
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"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.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Please, it's a European Space Agency operatoin, not European Union.
Someone shoots the moon and then people break out telescopes to watch it.
God spoke to me.
I am quite proud that my country, Britain, managed to successfully crash a probe into Mars.
I'm back from the computational astrobiology summer school in Honolulu and we were lectured by Karen Meech who was on the scientific comity for Deep Impact and in charge of all Earth based observations. Despite the catchy depiction of the mission as a space demolition derby its a perfectly valid way to study stuff out there.
/., people love to smash stuff. The science is hard to understand for the average tax payer but the impact isn't and Nasa is really outreach oriented. Next week a lot of people will talk about the recent smash at work, many more than those who talk about the holy quest from dark matter. Some of those will feel nostalgic and bring their kids star gazing and a new generation of astronomers will be on its way. Missions that are easy to understand keep the public interest high. One smash a year keeps the budget cut away?
... and we should build all new spacecrafts to be usefull when we smash them when they run out of fuel. To be usefull all the material should have its emission lines outside of Earth transparency window or at least outsides of windows for interesting stuff like organics. We should of course also launch a bunch of impactors will the sole goal of being smashed.
By smaching stuff hard enough they can vaporize matter and use Earth based spectrometers to get a really detailed description of the content. For those not into astronomy, when you split the light from a neon light, you see distinct rays, not a continuous spectrum. You can identify the gas in the tube by just looking at its rays, argon lights are different from neon and so on. When you vaporize any kind of matter you get a spectrum. You can tell whats in the sample by looking at emission or absorbsion rays depending on wether your sample is the light source or a filter. There is a catch, from Earth you can only tell the elements (and sometimes molecules) that have rays in the transparency windows of our atmosphere,
The good side of the Deep Impact kind of missions is that you can study an object on the "cheap". You just send something to be smashed and the science package is already on earth. No need to build a high price mass spectrometer and to find a way to land it without crashing. In the case of Deep Impact, you don't even need to accelerate the impactor, the comet already has all the momentum required to cause vaporization when it hits something on its path. Since Deep Impact was such a success, they figured that smashing old spacecraft was a good way to "recycle" them and rest assured that the space demolition derby is not about to end.
Another good point about smashing stuff is that is sounds cool. Just look at the comments here on
On a deeper philosophical ground I realize now that hackers should learn from this effort to present to the public an over simplistic view of what you do. Most of us can't explain to our parents what we do. This is because we try to stay accurate and I think that this is wrong. No one will start coding based on just your job description so a little inaccuracy should be allowed. As Kim Binsted told us, we should always have an elevator pitch version of what we do that anyone can understand; thats how you build contacts and how budgets are allocated.
Back to smashing stuff, I think that this is the best way we have to quickly respond to opportunities: a close-by asteroid, an unexpected comet, an alien spaceship,
By the way did you know that they are studying comets and asteroids as the putative primary vector of water and amino acids to Earth? Contrary to the Miller theory, the young earth might not have been such an efficient amino acids synthesizer. On the otherhand we keep finding those in carbonacous meteorites. We have an observation that the formation of chucks of rocks in space for an unknown reason creates the building blocks for life as a byproduct. Don't you think that we should smash a lot more stuff to learn more about it? I do, let the space demolition derby go on!
Is Christiane Amanpour on her way to the moon?
One can only hope.
The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. - William McDonough
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?
So say we all
You notice it's always "WE landed on the moon", but "the government" is fucking up things? "OUR team scored! Hooray!" at the start of the match, but "I can't believe THEY lost" at the end...?
Just an interesting observation. I call it "inclusive gain" and "exclusive loss".
..to buy the moon. Huh??
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
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.."
What is...?