NASA's LCROSS Moon Impact Mission Provides Great Data 91
Several sources are sending us reports of NASA's recent LCROSS Moon impact mission. While the visual results seem to be less than stunning, LCROSS Principal Investigator Anthony Colaprete said the initial results produced "the data we need," but refused to say anything about "water or no water." "The goal of this dual impact was to have the Centaur upper stage impact first, allowing the LCROSS spacecraft to observe close-up the results of the impact. In fairness, the view from LCROSS as it approached the moon was amazing — even though there was no obvious visual evidence of impact, which early data from the infrared camera on the craft indicates did occur. What happens next is a whole lot of math and science. The LCROSS spacecraft included nine individual science instruments. This suite of instruments consisted of one visible camera, two near-infrared cameras, two mid-infrared cameras, a visible light spectrometer, two near-infrared spectrometers, and a photometer. All nine of those instruments were gathering data simultaneously and streaming that data back to Earth."
Re:We will never colonize the moon (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you got it completely and utterly wrong. The truth is they'll never leave.
On earth, maximal lag can be up to 200 ms just because of great circle distance and light is traveling (correct if I'm wrong) at only 2/3 of speed of light in a fiber optic network. And that's assuming a straight cable.
The moon, however, is way more gamer friendly. It has no atmosphere, and thus no weather, so you can use shar... I mean lasers for communications. Maximal distance ping at the speed of light is just 36.4 ms. This means, if you have only two server locations and a network of laser linked towers, your worst round trip delay is below 19ms! Now tell me which gamer can resist a world as ideal as moon? Always perfect network and no one bothering you!