Posted on 10/06/2009 4:04:55 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Get ready for a unique cosmic collision! Early this coming Friday morning (Oct. 9), NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will end its mission with a bang — literally.
Currently carrying with it the upper stage of the rocket that launched it on its way to the moon on June 18, the game plan is to send that spent rocket motor on a course to smash into the lunar surface.
But just not anywhere on the lunar surface, but to a thoroughly scrutinized crater called Cabeus that lies near the moon's south pole and is enveloped in perpetual darkness. The hoped-for resultant effects will be to find hidden water ice frozen inside the crater.
And for seasoned skywatchers here on Earth, it should also produce a visible cloud of ejected material. However, only knowledgeable amateur astronomers with the right equipment will be a able to detect the event. Others can watch the event live on NASA TV.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Where and how to observe the LCROSS impacts
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/impact/index.html
Thanks for the ‘heads up’!
The impact is scheduled to occur this Friday, Oct. 9 at 11:30 UT. That’s 7:30 a.m. EDT; 4:30 a.m. PDT.
Cool! My friend has a crater on the Moon named after him. He discovered it with just a basic telescope in his back yard about 20 years ago. :)
darn thing is scheduled for zero zero dark thirty.. what the heck were they thinking?
I hope it makes a good splat.
Just our luck, the probe hits an unknown super fault and the moon splits in half giving us the famous “two moons over Miami!”(attempted humor on)
7:30 AM Eastern isn’t that bad.
Unless you don’t live on the east coast!
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/impact/impact_amateur.html
The LCROSS Centaur impact is scheduled for 4:31 a.m. PDT or 7:31 a.m. EDT (11:31 UTC) on October 9, 2009. The shepherding spacecraft will impact at 4:35 a.m. PDT or 7:35 a.m. EDT (11:35 UTC). Mission scientists estimate that the Centaur impact debris plume should be in view several seconds after Centaur impact and will peak in brightness at 30 to 100 seconds after impact.
probe hits an unknown super fault and the moon splits in half
Let me be the first to say
Bush’s Fault.
From what I understand this will not be visible to the unaided eye. A six inch reflecting telescope may not reveal anything but a scope that can zero in on the South polar region may reward a view of the plume created by light reflecting dust thrown up by the impact.
This thing launched on June 18??
Geesh
Kevin, you back yet?
san jose, ca here. west coast looks to have primo viewing conditions. I guess I can check it out when I take the dogs out. ya don’t see something like this every day.
I hope it doesn’t knock over the flag Armstrong and his pals planted there.
This event will be large enough that the flash from the impact will be visible with the naked eye. The plume it puts up may be visible with a good telescope, but the best bet is to Tivo NASA TV...
Impact is supposed to be around 0430 Pacific time so early risers on the Left Coast might be in for a show if the weather stays clear....
it took a while to get it lined up just right..
—
LCROSS Launch Information
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/launch/index.html
The LRO and LCROSS spacecraft were tucked inside the payload fairing at the top of the rocket to protect them from atmospheric heating as the rocket climbed through the atmosphere toward space. The fairing separated as planned and LRO pushed away from LCROSS and the Centaur stage on its way to going into orbit around the moon.
The LCROSS probe remained attached to the Centaur and will steer the empty rocket stage for about four months as mission controllers line up LCROSS and Centaur to collide with the moon in an effort to determine conclusively whether water exists on the lunar surface.
LCROSS is equipped with sensors to evaluate the plume from the Centaur stage when it hits the moon. Then LCROSS will fly through the plume before crashing into the lunar surface to kick up a second plume.
Here’s to big plumes..
Still pretty dark at 7:30 here in the midwest. I’ll watch for the flash but I suspect NASA TV will have the best seat in the house.
This is aimed at that crater where they think ice might reside?
Bottoms Up!
Yeah, but they indicated it will likely be hard to see as the sun will already be up. Too bad.
I am waiting for the announcement from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:
“We have always been at war with the Moon.”
Ralph Kramden just tweeted me to say that Alice might get there first.
That doesn't make sense to me.
Given that one surface of the moon constantly faces Earth,” that the Earth rotates on an axis that “wobbles” (is not in sync with the sun), and that the combined Earth-moon mass cycles around the sun in an elliptic orbit; there's no way that any part of the moon is in perpetual darkness.
We shall see
Gibb’s on Friday ... “Stimulus package incoming, thank’s be to Obama.”
Picture a crater as a ring-shaped mountain range. While it’s true that the precession (wobbling) of the moon tilts these polar craters into and out of the shade, the light only ever hits the peaks of the mountains; the deep “valley” of the crater below remains in their shadows.
I can’t get excited about a probe landing on the moon when we landed men on the moon forty years ago. We’ve taken a huge step back since then.
dat’s raciss!
June 18th. My daughters an I were at Kennedy Space Center for the shuttle launch. The shuttle was scrubbed and we saw the LCROSS and the LRO launch on an Atlas V rocket, which was a spectacular sight. We then went back to NC only to drive back down to Kennedy for 3 more scrubs, a total of 5. The shuttle launched the day we got back home to NC the second time. Even though we missed the shuttle, I had a great time with my 7 year-old daughter (and wound up going back to school to get a Masters degree in Space Studies at age 48 to fulfill a boyhood dream).
Very cool story
yah...they are supposed to have live video of the impacts from a number of good sources, so this really ought to be quite a show...
I plan on setting the TiVo and my alarm.
That way if I don’t get up, I still have it recorded.
I built some hardware for this (the wiring harness that connects all the sensors). It’ll be pretty neat to see my stuff get splatted all over the surface of the moon.
and short in useful information for the layman.
lots of crater pics, and not a single red dot marking the impact site.
Would that be too much trouble?
O.K. Extream heat impact, titaniam rich soil. and?
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