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NASA's LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth
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."
Turns out they were just over Detroit.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We should mount a robotic mission to this place right away.
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At the same time, we're still waiting from the SETI's calibration and observation to discover any trace of *Intelligence* on earth.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If intelligent life forms do exist on earth then why haven't they contacted me?
Unexpect the expected!
The search for intelligent life continues...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
... none of it was intelligent.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
It's life, Jim, just as we know it, just as we know it, Jim.
Beam me sideways, Scotty, nobody on this planet knows which way is up.
2 predictions:
* Lots of slashdot users trying to post something witty about why this is a new story
* trolls saying how this is everything we should expect and therefore should ignore.
to all those who disengaged their brain I ask, what would you do in their position? Hope your instruments work as designed without testing them? Either way, please devise a better test for life as we know it than life as we know it.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Doesn't it suffer from a serious risk of overfitting?
.. that if our machine can identify life on Earth all by itself, then we can possibly send it somewhere and it might be able to detect another planet or moon which has Earth-like life.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
It should be: NASA' LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Earth-Like Life On Earth
-- How many sigs are as useless as this one?
Theres no intelligent live down here!!
Oh, the irony..... ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
NASA discovers light from the sun, and no atmosphere on the moon.
Could the summary be any more vacuous? It could have been a bit more explanatory about the nature of the satellite. (i.e. to find water on the moon - source: http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/mission.htm)
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
They're outside of the faraday cage basement you're living in.
The spacecraft Galileo, on its way to Jupiter, performed a related experiment back in 1990. Details were published in Nature
I think it's a quote from Star Wars.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It's a misquote.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Note to spacefellowship:
I'm going to save google some bandwidth and expand the acronym:
LCrOSS=lunar crater observation & sensing satellite
Looking for intelligent life on earth. Scanning. Scanning. Scanning...
Segmentation fault. Core dumped.
detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation
What? No oil detector? This thing is useless!
No. Women visiting slashdot is still a theory.
...if it had found "intelligent life" that would have been a false positive.
Zargog says that his brother was lynched after he landed in Mississippi - try landing in one of the blue-coloured states!
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
So it mentions that they detect levels of methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc. etc.
In an uninhabited planet, methane and oxygen are two completely incompatible chemicals (over a time period which is considered tiny on astronomical scales, these two chemicals to react to form carbon dioxide.) Therefore, the coexistence of methane and oxygen implies that a process is actively forming these two molecules, so that an equilibrium is reached between production and decay. This process, in other words, is photosynthesis, which in turn, implies life.
The idea is that if we can detect incompatible chemicals in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, then we have a strong clue that life is on that planet, and what better way to calibrate our sensors than by pointing it at ourselves?
And what does say that life has to have the form that we know here on Earth?
What if there is life on a planet that actually uses Fluorine or Chlorine instead of Oxygen? It may not be life as we know it, but the environment may have forced that kind of life to evolve.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Late last year the planned UHCD (Unrefined HydroCarbon Detector) unit was ditched for a PGMCD (Potentially Generous Media Corporation Detector) unit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you can't discern a sarcastic remark without visual assistance, I think it's *you* that shouldn't be here.
My first reaction was similar - DUH! After reading more I realized it was an important step. It is a calibration of a true positive. Knowing what Earth looks like on the instruments will help in comparison to measurements of other heavenly bodies.
Like these.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Data is sent back using heavy encoding. Not for the sake of keeping people out, but for the sake of error correction and detection. The Voyager probes used the Extended Golay code when sending imagery back to Earth. From WP: "The extended binary Golay code encodes 12 bits of data in a 24-bit word in such a way that any triple-bit error can be corrected and any quadruple-bit error can be detected."
Radio transmission over astronomical distances is really hard, especially with objects like the massive open fusion reactor in the center of the solar system spewing forth all kinds of noise. Transmitting "in the clear" is practically worthless.