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Front Row Seats To NASA's Lunar Impact

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wait-that-is-a-moon dept.

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."

4 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. LCROSS Observation page by aembleton · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. More NasaTV feeds by agentgonzo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Robots by Viper23 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  4. Re:Linux users only have the telescope option by internewt · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    If you mean the link to the NASA TV page doesn't support Linux, viewing the source shows URLs for the video streams.

    All the video streams worked for me after saving the file provided by the URL, and opening it with VLC.

    Channels

    *Public Channel
    Live Events, Mission Coverage
    http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
    http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram
    http://www.nasa.gov/qtl/151335main_NASA_TV_QT.qtl

    *Media Channel
    Video file, other resources
    http://www.nasa.gov/145590main_Digital_Media.asx

    *Education Channel
    For students and teachers
    http://www.nasa.gov/145588main_Digital_Edu.asx
    http://www.nasa.gov/ram/145589main_Digital_Edu.ram

    *Live Space Station Video
    Earth Views and More (Details)
    http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx

    *Mission Audio
    (may be silent at times)
    http://www.nasa.gov/178952main_Mission_Audio_UP.asx

    --
    Car analogies break down.