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NASA To Trigger Massive Explosion On the Moon In Search of Ice
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA is preparing to launch the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which will fly a Centaur rocket booster into the moon, triggering a six-mile-high explosion that scientists hope will confirm whether water is frozen in the perpetual darkness of craters near the moon's south pole. If the spacecraft launches on schedule at 12:51 p.m. Wednesday, it will hit the moon in the early morning hours of October 8 after an 86-day Lunar Gravity-Assist, Lunar Return Orbit that will allow the spacecraft time to complete its two-month commissioning phase and conduct nearly a month of science data collection of polar crater measurements before colliding with the moon just 10 minutes behind the Centaur." (Continues, below.)
"The cloud from the Centaur rocket booster will kick up 350 metric tons of debris that should spread six miles above the surface of the moon, hitting the sunlight and making it visible to amateur astronomers across North America. Over the final four minutes of its existence, as LCROSS follows the same terminal trajectory as the Centaur, the spacecraft will train its instruments and cameras on the debris cloud, searching it for the chemical signature of water. Previous spacecraft and ground-based instruments have detected signs of hydrogen near the moon's poles, and scientists are split over whether that is from ice that could have arrived through the impact of comets or by other means. Despite all the serious scientific talk about hydrogen signatures and lunar regolith, flying a rocket booster into the moon at 5,600 mph to trigger a massive explosion is just flat-out cool. 'We're certainly going to be making a big splash,' says Kimberly Ennico, the LCROSS payload scientist. 'We're going to see something, but I don't know what to expect. I know on the night of the impact, I'll be running on adrenaline.'"
I really can't tell if this article is serious or not.
Like, this is part of a military plot to demonstrate to the Chinese (and others) that the moon is U.S. territory....
Blah blah blah, we're in a financial crisis, yada yada yada.
I'm sick of the Chicken Littles bemoaning any public spending because of this "financial crisis".
If the sky is falling because of this financial crisis, having NASA research stuff up in the sky is a good idea, I say.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Will it be possible to watch through binoculars or a telescope?
12:50 - press return.
Mythbusters wouldn't perform spectography on the resulting explosion...
(Although they are getting more clever as the years go on. I wouldn't be surprised if Adam becomes the new Mr. Wizard in the 2020's...)
I was actually visualizing the death star exploding. It kinda looks like the moon.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that a 10-12 in telescope should do the trick. To give a sense of scope, the moon is about 2,160 miles in diameter.
Well, to start with the mission is costing $78 million, not $20 billion. Second, it costs $100,000 to launch one (1) gallon of water on the Shuttle. Probably closer to $10,000 per gallon on other vehicles; but, we all know the Shuttle is expensive to operate. Even at $10k/gal, that's still a lot of money. So, if we are going to put people on the Moon, it makes no sense, economically, to send them water from Earth. Even in high orbit of Earth, it's likely to be more cost effective, in the long run, to lift water out of the Moon's gravity well than it is to lift water out of the Earth's gravity well. It is clearly the fiscally responsible thing to do.
Isn't this how the Time Machine movie started?
Several S-IVB stages from Saturn V rockets impacted the moon in the 1960s and '70s. All of them were more massive than the little Centaur.
At least one Apollo mission left seismic sensors on the moon, which recorded the effects of S-IVB impacts on later flights.