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How NASA Will Bomb the Moon To Find Water

Posted by kdawson on from the black-eye-on-green-cheese dept.

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.'"

9 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Bomb what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next they'll bomb Uranus in order to find it's filled with gas.

  2. percussion engineering! by notgm · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hit stuff to fix it all the time, why shouldn't they?

  3. That Old Mr. Show bit by Hoplite3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The United States can, should, and will BLOW UP THE MOON!"

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHpX5aa5Lz4

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    Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
  4. Re:Earth's Orbit? by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

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    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  5. Bombing the Moon for water? by BitterOldGUy · · Score: 5, Funny
    You mean liberate the Moon, don't you?

    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.

  6. Re:The Time Machine by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

    In that movie, construction was starting on the moon. To kick off the construction, a large bomb was set off. The result, the moon cracked in half and people eventually started to eat each other.

    Geez, a plot like that'd make me crack the DVD in half and eat it.
         

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    Table-ized A.I.
  7. Risk of retaliation by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

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  8. Re:Earth's Orbit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    African or European fly?

  9. This is Awesome by areReady · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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