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EU Craft Successfully Hits The Moon
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Sep 04, 2006 09:28 AM
from the but-you-said-to-turn-left! dept.
from the but-you-said-to-turn-left! dept.
An anonymous reader writes "SMART-1 has hit the Moon , just as planned and — even better — the impact threw out a bright infrared that was seen by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. There's an animation of the images grabbed by the telescope. Scientists now hope to analyse the chemistry of the rock ejected by the crash. If only you could dump old cars in such a useful way."
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DUMB-1 (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You may scoff, but there is a strong scientific reasoning behind this. Once we terraform the moon and have a society living up there, pretty soon that society is going to collapse. By hiding these scientific treasures for them to find in the distant future, we can potentially kick-start a resurgent scientific age and save ourselves a lot of trial and error.
We should also think about sticking some dinosaur fossils up there as well, just to get some heated religious/evolutionary debates underway.
How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:4, Informative)
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Your stone and string example is completely irrelevant; unless you do it very far away from the surfice of the earth, of course!
Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:5, Informative)
The purpose of the experiment was
1) To try the ION-engine
2) To get dust from the moon in the atmosphere for analysis
I think (1) justified it. The satellite had already done a good job (collecting information) for several years. Instead of letting it remain in the universe with all the other debris we put there, scientists decided to do something useful while scrapping it.
Parent
Re:How does one unsuccessfully hit the moon? (Score:4, Informative)
You're missing something. Due to the gravity disturbances of the earth and the sun, the orbit decays naturally. So it was bound to end up crashing on the moon. They had used up all but a few grams of the xenon gas, and the last maneuvres were done using the hydrazine thrusters (used for pointing and gyro offloading). They just set a favorable time and place of impact. Hmm, the "just" is maybe a bit misplaced; they did a great job.
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Ion drive (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't see any kind of change in the surface before/after - does anyone yet know if maybe it ricocheted back up again? 15 seconds/frame probably wouldn't show anything further...
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Hmmm, did these guys hire Fox News spin doctors to do the naming?
aliens beware (Score:5, Funny)
Re:aliens beware (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Mr. Show (Score:5, Interesting)
Just an interesting observation. I call it "inclusive gain" and "exclusive loss".
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So.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, you must've read THHGTTG (shameless paste follows):
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.
That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
ESA are working on that last bit.
Parent
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Ion-propulsion (Score:3, Interesting)
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and TheMoon... (Score:3, Funny)
Look out NASA... (Score:4, Funny)
Odd Differences eh? (Score:5, Funny)
European Space Agency gets their kicks by slamming into stuff...
American Space Agency gets their kicks by not getting off the ground...
I think the tide is starting to turn in the new space race
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The Moon Comments... (Score:2)
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Hm (Score:3, Funny)
Mapping the surface (Score:2, Funny)
The animation (Score:4, Funny)
Other coverage (Score:5, Informative)
Ion Drive Reporting (Score:4, Funny)
I'm looking forward to Fox New's report tonight where they illustrate the ion-drive part by showing a pic of Darth Vader's TIE fighter.
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for thosethat cant see the gif (Score:5, Funny)
******
******
Then:
******
** **
******
The image by the way... (Score:2)
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ESA (Score:5, Informative)
Ahem (Score:4, Funny)
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That's Nothing! (Score:5, Funny)
IS THIS AN INVASION? (Score:2)
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One can only hope.
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Oh, did you? Can NASA provide some original video tape or film reel with the Moon landing to prove what you claim?
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On smashing stuff (Score:5, Informative)
By smaching stuff hard enough they can vaporize matter and use Earth based spectrometers to get a really detailed description of the content. For those not into astronomy, when you split the light from a neon light, you see distinct rays, not a continuous spectrum. You can identify the gas in the tube by just looking at its rays, argon lights are different from neon and so on. When you vaporize any kind of matter you get a spectrum. You can tell whats in the sample by looking at emission or absorbsion rays depending on wether your sample is the light source or a filter. There is a catch, from Earth you can only tell the elements (and sometimes molecules) that have rays in the transparency windows of our atmosphere,
The good side of the Deep Impact kind of missions is that you can study an object on the "cheap". You just send something to be smashed and the science package is already on earth. No need to build a high price mass spectrometer and to find a way to land it without crashing. In the case of Deep Impact, you don't even need to accelerate the impactor, the comet already has all the momentum required to cause vaporization when it hits something on its path. Since Deep Impact was such a success, they figured that smashing old spacecraft was a good way to "recycle" them and rest assured that the space demolition derby is not about to end.
Another good point about smashing stuff is that is sounds cool. Just look at the comments here on
On a deeper philosophical ground I realize now that hackers should learn from this effort to present to the public an over simplistic view of what you do. Most of us can't explain to our parents what we do. This is because we try to stay accurate and I think that this is wrong. No one will start coding based on just your job description so a little inaccuracy should be allowed. As Kim Binsted told us, we should always have an elevator pitch version of what we do that anyone can understand; thats how you build contacts and how budgets are allocated.
Back to smashing stuff, I think that this is the best way we have to quickly respond to opportunities: a close-by asteroid, an unexpected comet, an alien spaceship,
By the way did you know that they are studying comets and asteroids as the putative primary vector of water and amino acids to Earth? Contrary to the Miller theory, the young earth might not have been such an efficient amino acids synthesizer. On the otherhand we keep finding those in carbonacous meteorites. We have an observation that the formation of chucks of rocks in space for an unknown reason creates the building blocks for life as a byproduct. Don't you think that we should smash a lot more stuff to learn more about it? I do, let the space demolition derby go on!
This proves nothing! (Score:2)