NASA's LCROSS Moon Impact Mission Provides Great Data

Several sources are sending us reports of NASA's recent LCROSS Moon impact mission. While the visual results seem to be less than stunning, LCROSS Principal Investigator Anthony Colaprete said the initial results produced "the data we need," but refused to say anything about "water or no water." "The goal of this dual impact was to have the Centaur upper stage impact first, allowing the LCROSS spacecraft to observe close-up the results of the impact. In fairness, the view from LCROSS as it approached the moon was amazing — even though there was no obvious visual evidence of impact, which early data from the infrared camera on the craft indicates did occur. What happens next is a whole lot of math and science. The LCROSS spacecraft included nine individual science instruments. This suite of instruments consisted of one visible camera, two near-infrared cameras, two mid-infrared cameras, a visible light spectrometer, two near-infrared spectrometers, and a photometer. All nine of those instruments were gathering data simultaneously and streaming that data back to Earth."

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Re:Why we should blow up the moon...

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Somebody's going to Mars. I hope it's us. It's not just that there's all that stuff to claim ownership of. You see... in orbit around the sun, right by Mars, there's this huge pile of rocks...

It turns out that if you live uphill from some really obnoxious people, you can just roll some big rocks down the hill to make them shut up. In order to make you stop they have to climb up that really steep hill, so it's likely they'll just see reason. Some of those rocks are really big. Killing the dinosaurs type big.