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How NASA Will Bomb the Moon To Find Water
mattnyc99 writes "A few weeks ago we got first word of NASA's plan to crash a spacecraft into the moon next February. The new issue of Popular Mechanics has an in-depth look at the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and its low-cost, lightning-fast mission prep — even if delays have pushed it to late February or early March. Quoting: 'Andrews had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F. Instead, Blue Ice and its partners at Northrop Grumman came up with a concept to bring the lunar floor out in the open.... Since engineering precision hardware would break the budget, the LCROSS team had to make existing components work together.'"
the "bomb" weighs 5,000 pounds (2200 kg). It's most certainly been hit by heavier objects in its lifetime. The mass of the moon is ~ 7e1022 kg. Would you notice if a fly farted on you?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The mass of the moon is ~ 7e1022 kg
I think you're mixing up 7x10^22 and 7e22 there; the Moon's mass most certainly is not 7e1022 kg. Estimates for the mass of the observable universe, for example, are around 2e52 kg.
That said I agree with your point - this will have an utterly negligible affect on the orbital dynamics of the Moon.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Granite contains Uranium. Get a geiger counter and test the nearest granite countertop and be amazed!
Of course, it's not *dangerous*, but it is definitely radioactive.
I though it was well within our current power to fuck up the Earth's orbit. Given that the whole time I was growing up we were constantly told we could "blow up the Earth 20 gazillion times over" I was under the impression that we could fairly easily knock it off kilter.
When people say we could blow up the entire Earth, they really mean we could cover the surface of the Earth in nuclear explosions. It would kill all of us, but the Earth wouldn't care. It would just keep trundling along as ever.
Some maths: Suppose we wanted to increase the speed of the Earth by 1m/s. Kinetic energy = mass * speed^2, so (as the mass of the Earth is 5.9736*10^24 kg) we'd need 5.9736*10^24 joules. A megaton explosion is 4.184*10^15 J, so we'd need the equivalent of about a billion megatonnes of TNT. That's about one hundred million pretty big nukes (assuming all the energy of the nukes goes into the Earth's movement, which it wouldn't). And that's just to accelerate the Earth by 1m/s. And when you add to that the fact that the Earth's orbit is stable (so we need a lot of movement to do any real damage), you can see how little we could really do.
Hope that makes sense!
Most of the radioactivity in stone and ceramic building materials is from potassium 40 decay, not uranium.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.