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 ...
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?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.