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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 feel like this is at the end of a episode of Myth Busters where they can't get something to work so they just blow it up. We can't find water on the Moon so let's just blow some of it up instead. Waste of money when the economy is in the tank...I'm glad we have our priorities in the right place.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Do they even have the right to just blast away at anything they want....what do other nations think of possibly crippling the moon should the explosion be too big.
What about this supposed crash into the earth, is this why they are really trying to nudge the moon off its course...
What if they had discovered something up on the moon, and wanted to destroy it (such as aliens) before we found out about it, or any other country (China) were to set foot on the moon, maybe there was an agreement with an alien life form to not divulge its existence to humankind.
What if this is really a ploy to hide the fact that we never went up to the moon, and by somehow disturbing or destroying the moons surface enough, to change any markers (footprints) left behind by our astronauts (supposedly), they would never prove otherwise
that we never REALLY set foot on the moon, and that the whole thing was staged.
What if this back fires, and destroys the moon in half, and changes our whole magnetic field caused by the moon's pull, could we see a chaotic future with anarchy running a muck?
I have no doubt that we faked the moon landing. Blowing a chunk out of it is just our way of telling others to back off. That's just how we roll in America. If your nation wants to land there first we're gonna blow you up.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
"permanent lunar base"
There has been a permanent base on the moon since the 60's. It actually is a colony of bustling humans from many countries but originally was created by Americans and Russians during the height of the "cold war".
This seemed like fiction a few years ago but now is sounding very scientific. Things are definitely speeding up in this quadrant of the galaxy... especially with the launch of the water busting missile to the moon.
NASA already discovered water on the moon and finding even larger amounts would permit the colony (colonies) to grow significantly. There is no oversight for what the global corporate/military complex does and so they can take leaps into space without question or scrutiny and they owe no answers to humanity on Earth.
I worked with missiles launches at Vandenburg in the 60's and 70's and afterwards was an engineer at McDonnell Douglas for years... before their unfortunate demise in the 90's.
The advantage of being in a colony there, of course, is that the "Earth crisis" can be monitored freely from the vantage point of the moon and eventually will serve as an impending evacuation point if one is ever needed for the elite.