Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's a pretty safe bet that the impact of the Centaur module will awaken some ancient lunarian race which will immediately begin waging a campaign to subjugate Earth once and for all, so it would behoove you to watch one of these feeds in order to be prepared for the inevitable.
... GORDON .....
Flash!!!
I wish that the "Mythbusters" guys would fly the probe into the Moon with one of them screaming, "I wanna see something blow up!"
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
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.
Maybe it is because of the extremely low temperature at the moon's poles and that any robotic being would not survive. I also understand that any water ice exposed to the sun on the moon would almost instantly sublimate, so I guess that an impact lifting tons of moon regolith is the most logical step in seeing water ice for a short moment, right before it sublimates because of the sun's energy it will be exposed to.
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...
If the probe misses
Prayers would be the least of their worries, it would mean that NASA can't hit the broad side of a planet from 20 paces!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The main problem is probably powering a robot on the moon without solar power.
Take some science class. Things lose heat in vacuum by emitting radiation (typically infrared at our temperature). You might also learn that crashing is easier than landing (less delta-V), kinetic energy is a bitch at that kind of speed and will create an explosion, and people here on Earth actually use explosions to excavate material, not robotic spoons.
Looks like NASA has launched a large white glass plate and placed it in near earth orbit. It is sitting exactly in the line of sight from Earth to moon. People normally see through this the real Moon. But at the appointed time, NASA will project an image using lasers and create an illusion of a spacecraft crashing into moon, and then turn off the projection. Ha, haa, NASA, we got you. We got you all figured it out. Your jig is up. We will not be denied our meal ticket no matter what you do.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When that probe hits deep within the crater, it will finally puncture the Moon's skin and we all know what happens to a water balloon!
Come on now, we all know that the moon is filled with cheese.
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
It raises the question of why we're spending any time at all on the moon. It can't be lived on, it's unlikely to harbor life, its geology has already been explored. Someone tell me what the point is...
Its surface geology has been explored, but not what's beneath. As for why to explore it, it's the closest heavenly body to the earth, so it's a good place to start. It's cheap and easy to get to, and a good stepping stone to future missions. Do you think the Viking or Mariner missions would have been successful if not for the Surveyor moon missions? If we ignore moon science, we make all future space missions more difficult and expensive.
If you don't think astronomy isn't important, then you must hate science. If you think the moon isn't important, you're just not thinking practically.
Of course, the reason for using a satellite impact is because it's cheaper and easier to determine if there is any water at all (which scientists aren't sure of). If there isn't, we saved ourselves a bunch of money by not sending up an expensive excavator robot. If there is, then we can determine how best to determine the geological significance, and what that means for the history of our solar system and potential future moon missions.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
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.