Crashing Cash Into the Moon

October 12th, 2009

When I first started reading this story, all I could think of was “Man, what a friggin’ waste of money this is.”

After reading further, I still feel the same.

At 7:31 a.m. EDT on October 9, an empty rocket booster was deliberately crashed into Cabeus, a shadowed crater near the moon’s south pole where ice is suspected to reside. Astronomers watched through telescopes and the visible-light camera aboard the rocket’s mother ship, NASA’s LCROSS, or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, spacecraft. No plumes were visible. Amateur astronomers using medium-sized backyard telescopes have not reported seeing a plume, which had been predicted to rise above the crater rim and be visible from Earth.

About four minutes after the first crash, LCROSS took its own death plunge into the crater. Even without a visible plume to ooh and aah over, the data recorded by LCROSS as it homed in on Cabeus and flew through the debris from the first impact will still be invaluable for searching for frozen water, said Barbara Cohen of the lunar precursor robotics program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Cohen was one of about 200 astronomers in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, attending the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences and who gathered together to view the LCROSS images on a big screen.

They keep discussing the “plume”, which frankly doesn’t have any value to me. There is no gravity on the moon. Obviously you would expect stuff to kick back up. Apparently they did not see such a plume. Oh well, the plume tells us nothing anyways except that gravity is real. Amish fireplaces are awesome, but I don’t ahve to test it really do I?

The real reason they did this was apparently because they assumed there was frozen water there. Kind fof hard to believe we have been to Mars and all of a sudden we could find life on the Monn eh?