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.'"

Comments

Re:Fahrenheit?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

You know, while I'm generally in favor of the metric system over imperial, I've never cared nearly so much about the Celsius v. Fahrenheit debate.

Fahrenheit makes more sense in day to day contexts. 0 is very cold, 100 is very hot (both from a human experience point of view), and you have more precision on the temperatures in between. Now in this particular case it's so cold that it doesn't really matter; if I told you it was -184 C, or -300 F it wouldn't really change the fact that you can't conceive of the temperature as anything but "really, really cold".

Besides, who are you trying to chastise? The temperature was given in a quote from the article. Would you prefer Slashdot editors mangle quotes to conform to your prejudices?