This good Samaritan was spotted, in the rumored water, salvaging beer for a hapless store owner.
Posted on 01/15/2008 10:05:30 AM PST by RightWhale
Quest to find water on the moon moves closer to launch NASA NEWS RELEASE
Posted: January 14, 2008
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - Cameras and sensors that will look for the presence of water on the moon have completed validation tests and been shipped to the manufacturer of NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.
The science instruments for the satellite, which is known as LCROSS, departed NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field Calif., for the Northrop Grumman Corporation's facility in Redondo Beach, Calif. to be integrated with the spacecraft. A video file is available on NASA Television. LCROSS is scheduled to launch with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., by the end of 2008.
"The goal of the mission is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator at Ames. "The identification of water is very important to the future of human activities on the moon."
In 2009, LCROSS will separate into two parts and create a pair of impacts on the permanently dark floor of one of the moon's polar craters. The spent Centaur upper stage of the Atlas V rocket will hit the moon, causing an explosion of material from the crater's surface. The instruments aboard the satellite will analyze the plume for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials. The satellite then will fly through the plume on a collision course with the lunar surface. Both impacts will be visible to Earth and lunar-orbiting instruments.
Northrop Grumman is designing and building the spacecraft. After installing the instruments on the satellite, Northrop Grumman will test the entire spacecraft system to ensure it is flight worthy.
During development of the LCROSS payload, Ames engineers and scientists built new spaceflight hardware and used new testing procedures to take advantage of lower cost, commercially available instruments. The team subjected the commercial instruments and NASA-developed components to conditions simulating the harsh environment of spaceflight. Working closely with the commercial instrument manufacturers, all safety and operational concerns were addressed quickly and efficiently. "This payload delivery represents a new way of doing business for the center and the agency in general," said Daniel Andrews, LCROSS project manager at Ames. "LCROSS primarily is using commercial-off-the-shelf instruments on this mission to meet the mission's accelerated development schedule and cost restraints."
"This arrangement has proven to work very well," Andrews added. "The vendors work with their products and develop a spaceflight knowledge base, and the LCROSS project gets very mature products for deployment on this mission."
Rumor has it that water has been spotted in the vicinity of New Orleans.
Never mind the water. What the world needs now is OIL. Sweet oil! It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
Out there are entire planets of oil.
You’re wrong. The technology is there to move beyond crude oil. We just haven’t done it yet because oil has been so cheap. Now that the price of oil is going through the roof, these methods become increasingly economically feasible. And no, I’m not talking about corn ethanol.
FedGov had $10 billion allocated to synthfuel in 1948. They forgot about it during the next 20 years of worldwide oil glut. No oil glut now, not since 1973, and why synthfuel wasn’t developed then would be criminal if that classification existed for national gov’t.
This good Samaritan was spotted, in the rumored water, salvaging beer for a hapless store owner.
There will be no Mars human exploration without discovery of water on the moon. Payload just too great.
You are so right.
Russians have announced they are going send an expedition to Mars. That will be awesome, especially the expense if they land rather than just fly by and we hope they get home all right although the odds are not good.
They going to adhere the frozen H20 to one side of the exterior of the spacecraft to cut down on solar radiation? This is a dangerous mission and radiation will be severe. It’s not like Columbus taking off from Genoa.
AntiKev, do you know what “facetious” means?
[for some reason this post did not take the first time around and so I'm trying again]
first time that has happened to me. Sorry about the double post.
Am I the only one who got paid today?
The database has been working sporadically for a couple weeks. It gets so nobody knows what has gone through or not until later when the webmasters get it going again for a while.
Thanks RW, I haven’t been posting that much so now I know.
Yep. But you never know with some people on this forum.
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