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."

Comments

Provides great data?

[Kemanorel]

For great justice!

We will never colonize the moon

[sakdoctor]

The moon has a completely insurmountable 1.2 second ping.
Even if a first generation move to the moon, their kids won't put up with a 1.2+ second ping in halo, and will move back to earth when they are 16.
So you see, it won't be sustainable.

Re:We will never colonize the moon

[Sets_Chaos]

What do you think the carbon nanotubes are for? We are going to run those to the moon to drop ping times down to more acceptable level. Everyone know wired is way faster than wireless...

Re:We will never colonize the moon

[idontgno]

Signal propagation in conductors is only a fraction of lightspeed.

This site, a cabling vendor, has a nice graph towards the middle of the page. Reading that graph tells me that the propagation delay of their twisted pair is 470 ns over a 100 m run.

Google calc tells me that that works out to 212,765,957 meters per second. Scorching, eh? But compared to lightspeed?

Again, let's ask Google calc

Oh, that's only 71% of the speed of light. OK, so, that's a bit slower. Based on simple RTT and the signal propagation speed difference, your 2.4 sec ping just went up to just over 4 seconds.

Yeah, ok, you were joking. And carbon nanotubule conductors may have a signal propagation speed higher than even virgin-copper oxygen-free 2-gauge Monster(tm) brand network cable. Or not. But even a superconductor, insulated with either vacuum or a dielectric insulator, has a signal propagation speed measured as a fraction of the speed of light. (I've heard .95c cited.)

Superconductors are used, in fact, as delay lines.

Re:We will never colonize the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you got it completely and utterly wrong. The truth is they'll never leave.

On earth, maximal lag can be up to 200 ms just because of great circle distance and light is traveling (correct if I'm wrong) at only 2/3 of speed of light in a fiber optic network. And that's assuming a straight cable.

The moon, however, is way more gamer friendly. It has no atmosphere, and thus no weather, so you can use shar... I mean lasers for communications. Maximal distance ping at the speed of light is just 36.4 ms. This means, if you have only two server locations and a network of laser linked towers, your worst round trip delay is below 19ms! Now tell me which gamer can resist a world as ideal as moon? Always perfect network and no one bothering you!

while we're linking websites about it

[Trepidity]

It might be worth pointing to the mission site or project site at NASA.

Re:while we're linking websites about it

[Informative]

The PDFs for the press conference have pictures containing a white dot which are alledged to be the crater and the explosion.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/392841main_SSC-data.pdf

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/360020main_LRO_LCROSS_presskit2.pdf

Is it just me

[clong83]

... or does this posting say almost nothing? "We blew up a crater on the moon, and boy our data is great. Check back with you guys later."

Is this just NASA-speak for "We haven't analyzed the data yet but we wanted to make some sort of comment anyways"?

Re:Is it just me

[Ethanol-fueled]

It's NASA speak for "*sigh*, what the fuck are we even doing?"

NASA TV showed the ride in

[ronsr]

There's a nice sequence of screen-grabs showing the journey into lunar oblivion plus summary of the post-impact press conference here.

It was strange not seeing any massive impact plume like expected, but seems they got spectroscopic data which is what really matters. You got the sense that all the journos were disappointed there wasn't a big KABOOM with all those questions asked about it in the press conference.

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

[peragrin]

If you listened to the conspiracy idiots recently you would think we did blow up the moon.

Re:A high energy impact with the moon's surface..

[skine]

I think when you mix math and science it's an applied orgasm.

No translation needed. But in other words...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

- We didn't miss the aim point.
  - None of the instruments malfunctioned.
  - We didn't lose the data on the way back.
  - We'll tell you what it means once we're done analyzing and checking it.

In still other words "The project passed THE major milestone and is on track with nothing broken."