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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.'"
Next they'll bomb Uranus in order to find it's filled with gas.
I hit stuff to fix it all the time, why shouldn't they?
"The United States can, should, and will BLOW UP THE MOON!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHpX5aa5Lz4
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Well all mass exerts a gravitational pull on all mass, so yes they affect each other.
Are you afraid this will affect the Earth's orbit around the Sun? The change will be negligible --- the energy we'd need to mess up the orbits dangerously is far beyond us.
The moon is smacked by meteors all the time, many much larger than any space probe could ever be. After all, it has a nasty case of acne scars. Most meteors are still usually too small to make any detectable difference. It's probably been hit by some biggies that perhaps could alter its orbit, but the average direction of the smackage either averages out or has a tendency already reflected in its current orbit. The largest impacts that created the round dark sea-like areas appear to have happened fairly soon after its formation.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
And I find the 'water' reason to be pretty transparent. We all know that there's oil up there and this is yet another neo-con plan that's going to suck us into another war to boost Bush's ratings. But when images of those poor Amazon women up there start coming back, it's jut going to blowup in their faces like Iraq did, and further depress our economy.
Where is the "Whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag? If this article had ANYTHING to do with biology, it would have been up already.
Geez, a plot like that'd make me crack the DVD in half and eat it.
Table-ized A.I.
My God. Has the IQ of Slashdot dropped twenty points in the last fifteen minutes?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
temperatures close to minus 300 F
1850 called. They want their unit of measure back.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
The good news is that the Loonies can't do anything about it. I mean, all they could do is throw rocks at us, and what good would that do?
I am officially gone from
It's a bit hard to tell but I'm afraid you're on to something. We seem to be getting more "whoosh" posts before the joke.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What the hell is going on here? Did all of you people click the link for stupid pills offered in a spam e-mail?
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
If you are indeed worried about this, perhaps a remedial course in physics is in order. You might start a couple of books before the ones on orbital mechanics.
If you're funn'in us - well, sorry - not quite enough caffeine here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Look up gravity on the internet, if you don't believe me. I don't like the idea of loosing the moon just for sake of an experiment.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
African or European fly?
Simple physics tells us that bombing it with any bomb we currently have or are likely to have in the forseeable future will make no measurable difference and probablly a lot less difference than the various natural rocks that have hit the moon over the centuries.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Virtually all of the mass of this mission, except for maybe a little rocket propellant, will stay within the Earth-Moon system, so the center of gravity of the two won't change. In other words, no, this won't affect Earth's Orbit thanks to CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM!!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
I have mod points, but I don't know whether to rate you -1 Off Topic or +1 Funny
Hopefully someone else can make the proper call as I do a quick search for Amazon moon women.
That's decent of you. I wish more folks would do that. When I first started, someone gave me a -1 Troll for what I thought was something quite funny. Well the deal is, even if I have a +5 Funny, modding me -1 whatever gives the comment an overall score of -1. And if you're just starting out, well, you post from then on at 0 or -1 if another didn't get or didn't like the joke.
The Author was Kim Stanley Robinson, not Ben Bova. And the space elevator wrapping around Mars had no connection with water. We could nuke the moon with everything we got and it wouldn't do jack to our eco-system. I really hope these kinds of comments are sarcastic, noodley one help us if they aren't.
Somehow, this mission strikes me as one of the coolest things NASA's done in a while. It's a struggling unit of the organization, working with spare parts from scrapped projects, jury-rigging a satellite together that will tow the spent upper stage of a rocket to the moon and smash the chunk of metal otherwise slated to be space debris into the closest heavenly body to send an Earth-visible (with a decent telescope) plume from one of its poles. Finally, it will analyze the plume to figure out if there's ice there.
Totally. Awesome
Apparently to make this work NASA will have to hit the opening of a thermal vent that's less than 2 meters across at the end of a canyon lined with defensive gun placements.
Many NASAians died getting us this information.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"He wasn't an astronaut! He was a TV comedian. And he was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife."
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
That is what I was thinking.
I heard a conspiracy theory that the renewed interest in the moon by NASA at the direction of George Bush was due to the discovery of Helium-3 there.
Helium-3 is a non-radioactive isotope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3
My understanding of this is that this means is you can have fusion without radiation only dealing with heat and actually raw electricity as a by product. So it seems the energy generation is far greater than other forms of fusion. ... Or in other words.. Bush is invading the moon for a new kind of "oil".
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
looks like someone is testing the capability of controling extraplanetary missiles.
Earth did have a second moon (first moon?).
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/second_moon_991029.html
It grew up and moved out. Now it just visits once in a while.
> Isn't Earth's orbit intimately mingled with it's moon?? How precise can the potential impact be measured in relation to this fact? I think Earth's orbit is fine where it is...
Sigh. I blame public schooling.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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!
Your computation actually has some errors in it. The amount of energy required to increase the earth's speed from what it is (about 30,000 m/s) by 1 m/s is not the same as the amount of enery needed to increase it from 0 to 1 m/s (which is what you computed, except that you also made a mistake by a factor of 2).
A better estimate (with same mass, but increasing the speed from 30,000 m/s to 30,001 m/s) yields
1.7921e29 joules needed. That's 5 orders of magnitude greater than your solution.
I once computed that to remove the top 1cm of topsoil or water from all the worlds land masses and oceans, and throw them out into outer space at escape velocity, we'd need to perfectly use the energy of 100 billions bombs like Hiroshima's. I wanted to see whether exploding a planet like the Death Star does in Episode 4 was realistic. It isn't. At escape velocity, the chunks of the planets would take 6 minutes to double the planet's volume (so the explosion would look very very slow).
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.
Even if we could blow up the Earth several times over (we can't), doing that requires orders of magnitude less energy than actually changing the Earth's orbit. If you blow up the Earth into millions of tiny little chunks, all those tiny little chunks will keep happily orbiting the sun (See: Asteroid belt) at very nearly the current speed and path that the Earth currently travels.
An object with the mass of the Earth, travelling through space at the speed that it is, has an unbelievable amount of kinetic energy. We can divide it up into smaller pieces, but actually changing the amount of orbital energy in the entire mass is rather far beyond us.
Random and weird software I've written.
How soon we forget the lessons from 2002's prescient "The Time Machine". Remember what happened to the jerks who tried to blast out the moon to build luxury condos?... For all of you out there who think this is a great idea: don't come crying to me when the only public technology left is a sheet of glass with a talking hologram of Orlando Jones.