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NASA's LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth

Posted by timothy on from the that-was-the-control-group dept.

Matt_dk writes "On Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009, the LCROSS spacecraft successfully completed its first Earth-look calibration of its science payload. 'The Earth-look was very successful' said Tony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist. 'The instruments are all healthy and the science teams was able to collect additional data that will help refine our calibrations of the instruments.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."

6 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Calibrating with Earth by Tangamandapiano · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Doesn't it suffer from a serious risk of overfitting?

  2. Re:What gets me.... by tenco · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, I don't know what they actually do, but i would look for a dip in the spectrum of the planet's albedo were the spectrum of the nearest star has a maximum.

  3. been done before by jschen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The spacecraft Galileo, on its way to Jupiter, performed a related experiment back in 1990. Details were published in Nature

  4. Re:Meanwhile, SETI... by Aladrin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know you're joking, but there -have- been positives from SETI that actually came from Earth, so... It has.

    --
    "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
  5. Re:What gets me.... by ae1294 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They just got a license to use this technology...

    Last summer the West Virginia State Police allowed ORINCON to test the ability of hyperspectral optical technology to locate crops of marijuana. Given the success of that test, ORINCON has been invited to participate in this summer's interdiction effort to further validate the technology and demonstrate a more advanced detection unit.

    http://cannabisnews.com/news/5/thread5978.shtml

  6. Re:Pre-empting the obvious by metaforest · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Personally I don't think anyone questioned the QA value of pointing the science instruments at the earth to calibrate them.

    Trolls aside, Captain Obvious, what DID you expect?

    Stunned-to-silence wonderment?