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EU Craft Successfully Hits The Moon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-you-said-to-turn-left! dept.

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."

6 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? by Eevee · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? by Zo0ok · · Score: 5, Informative

      Shouldnt reply to AC but anyway...

      The purpose of the experiment was
        1) To try the ION-engine
        2) To get dust from the moon in the atmosphere for analysis

      I think (1) justified it. The satellite had already done a good job (collecting information) for several years. Instead of letting it remain in the universe with all the other debris we put there, scientists decided to do something useful while scrapping it.

  2. for thosethat cant see the gif by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Then:

    ******
    **  **
    ******

  3. ESA by Englabenny · · Score: 5, Informative

    Please, it's a European Space Agency operatoin, not European Union.

  4. On smashing stuff by YGingras · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    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 /., 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?

    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, ... 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 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!

  5. Re:Mr. Show by Andrew+Kismet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".