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Front Row Seats To NASA's Lunar Impact
itwbennett writes "Tomorrow morning at 7:30 EDT, NASA is going to crash a probe into the moon as part of its LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite) mission, the main purpose of which is to discover if there's any water on the moon. 'If you happen to have a 10-12" telescope (or larger) then you might be able to see the plume from your backyard,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'For the rest of us, the impact will be streamed live over the web in a few places. NASA will have a feed, beginning at 6:15 EDT. The NASA feed includes live footage from the spacecraft itself as well as expert commentary and other goodies. Astronomy service SLOOH is offering a double-shot of earth-bound feeds, with one feed from New Hampshire and the other from Arizona. The SLOOH feeds start at 6:30 am EDT.'" Update: Matt_dk adds a link to a viewing guide to the impact, writing that "Amateur astronomers need a 10-inch or bigger telescope to make observations."
NASA have set up a webpage for the LCROSS Observation Campaign: http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/observation.htm
By the way, it is at 11.30 UTC for those who don't know how far their timezone is from EDT.
NasaTV Feeds at different resolutions:
100k/s, 320/240
200k/s, 320/240
500k/s, 480x360 (I think)
100k/s, 640/480
All Windows Media format
Real media format
Quicktime
For those of you who need to watch it in absolute realtime, I've found that all the yahoo feeds (windows media) whilst being the best video quality are generally about 1-2 minutes behind realtime. Realmedia is normally about 5-10 seconds behind realtime.
The reason it's so cold is that it's in a crater that doesn't let the sun in. As for freezing your robot, there is no atmosphere to leach heat off of your robot, so at the most you'd need to make up for heat lost through your highly insulated tires.
The main advantage of using a robot (other than "you've got a robot on the moon") is that you can study the structure / layout of the minerals in place rather than just their composition...
This probe impact is going to kick up vastly more material than a practical robot could ever dig. If your goal is an existence proof of water, and you don't know how common it is, then you want to go through as much material as possible. Phoenix barely scratched the surface of Mars. If signs of water had been more than a few inches deep, it wouldn't have found them before it died.
Maybe once we've confirmed there's water in those craters, it'll be worth sending a robot of some kind to take a closer look.
The enemies of Democracy are
The site linked to in this story doesn't appear to support OS's other than windows and mac for streaming video.
Maybe (hopefully) I'm not looking hard enough but at first glance their is no linux support.
Good thing I have a telescope.