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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.'"
am I the only one who thinks we should blow everything up *here* before we start blowing everything up elsewhere?
I really can't tell if this article is serious or not.
Our intelligence is that they are storing WMD's on the moon.
To anybody who doesn't get this, it's a reference to The Tick, a brilliant super-hero/spoof TV animation. In one of the episodes, a super-villain called Chairface Chippendale tries to write his name on the moon. For some reason. I seem to remember that later in the series, you can still see the partially written word "Chairface" in the moon.
My favourite Tick episode is where he gets flu and, for some reason, has to fight a version of himself made out of snot. He wins by snorting it into himself and sneezing it into a dimensional portal. Nice.
SO, NASA is going the way of Mythbusters - from an organization devoted to scientific inquiry into one that just blows things up for kicks...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Guys, get ready to have two moons.
Sept 13, 1999. Ten years and a few days late. Space:1999
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11aug_lcross.htm
Equivalent to 2000 pounds of TNT. That's less than a bunker buster bomb carried by an F15. The moons been hit by stuff a lot more powerful, like the enormous asteroids that made the 1000-mile craters you can see without a telescope.
It's ok to blow things up if you just want to know if "there is water there."
For instance, I just blew up a watermelon 'to see if there was water in there.' It was moist, leading me to believe that there is, in fact, water in there. Then I blew up a junk yard Ford Pinto so I could verify that there was not, in fact, "water in there." As I suspected, there wasn't.
Oh yea, remember that 2002 or whatever make of The Time Machine? With the fragmented moon? Lets just hope this time it doesn't come crashing down on Earth.
Well, technically it didn't come crashing down on the earth, the explosions they created for the lunar colony caused the moon to drop out of its natural orbit, which in turn has massive gravational effects on earth that more or less started tearing apart the continants, forcing people to make a decision to either try and survive on the surface, or retreat underground for their survival.