Recent Stories with tag centaur

Certain people found my moon-cracking-open-like-an-egg fears alarmist. And obviously, in retrospect, the egg is on my face.* NASA's LCROSS mission, designed to test for water (ice, actually) on the moon, went off without a hitch at around 4:30 this morning. The Centaur rocket made its divot, the following spacecraft sent back its data (series of photos, impact video), and then it too augured in a few minutes later, leaving a 100-foot-wide hole.

However, sane people do have concerns about tossing our old tincan spacecraft all over the moon. As National Geographic reports, NASA has already littered the lunar surroundings with over two dozen orbiters, landers, and rovers. It sounds funny, but there's a growing "lunar conservationist" movement that wants to make sure future smash landings are carefully vetted, so that the moon doesn't end up looking like Oscar Madison's apartment. Neatniks in space!

*I can't believe I left off the /joke tag.

Photo: NASA

I know some of you may be wondering what NASA's LCROSS mission (aka "bombing the moon") has to do with Seattle, and it is simply this: If the moon happens to crack open after impact, that stuff is going to go everywhere.

"This is a completely unique mission that will excavate two large holes dozens of meters across on the lunar surface. It will give us composition measurements we wouldn't otherwise be able to get," said Tim McClanahan, from Goddard Space Flight Center.

And it may end life as we know it. Good night, moon. (It's almost as bad as CERN sucking us into a black hole.)

Here is the deal: NASA is winding up its Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission with a bang. The mission launched last June 18, and its goal is to determine whether there's ice on the moon. Tonight, the spacecraft will separate from its upper-stage Centaur rocket, and the rocket will impact a crater at the lunar south pole at about 4:30 a.m.PDT.

Photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Cue moon dust. The spacecraft will shoot through the plume and analyze the shit out of it in a hurry, because four minutes later it's due to smack into the moon itself. (It's got two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer, says NASA.)

The idea is that once the moon dust hits the sunlight above the crater rim, anything water-esque will vaporize and the instruments will catch the results. NASA says, in all seriousness, that we need to know if the moon's got water because it would totally help with manned interplanetary trips....

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