Did Chandrayaan Find Organic Matter On the Moon? 141
Matt_dk writes "Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon's surface. 'The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,' Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA's chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea."
The year (Score:3, Funny)
Cool, just in time for 2010
Re:organic buzzword (Score:5, Funny)
Oblig. Futurama quote (Score:1, Funny)
Re:"Life" or "organics"? (Score:5, Funny)
Neil Armstrong's Pee (Score:3, Funny)
I bet what they found was some of our astronaut's pee pee on the moon.
Or maybe a discarded moon pie wrapper.
Or maybe a bottle of scotch.
mmmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Neil Armstrong's Pee (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Life" or "organics"? (Score:5, Funny)
For those wondering about the toilets - From the book called A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts:
But one aspect of weightlessness was so unpleasant was so unpleasant that even the thrill of exploration didn't make up for it. If this marvel of engineering called Apollo had one major design flaw, it was the 'Waste Management System,' perhaps the most euphemistic use of English ever recorded. For urine collection there was a hose with a condom-like fitting at one end which led, by way of a valve, to a vent on the side of the spacecraft. On paper at least, it seemed like a reasonable, if low-tech, way to handle urinating in zero g, assuming you got over your anxiety about connecting yor private parts to the vacuum of space. You roll on the condom, open the valve, and it all goes into the void where it freezes into droplets of ice that are iridescent in the sunlight. One astronaut answered the question "What's the most beautiful sight you ever saw in space?" with "Urine dump at sunset."
In reality, using the urine collector didn't work so well. For one thing, it could be painful. If you opened the valve too soon, some part of the mechanism was liable to poke into the end of your penis, which prevented you from urinating. And at that point, as if to confirm your worst fears, the suction began to pull you in. Now you were being jabbed and pulled at the same time, so you shut the valve, and as the mechanism resealed itself it caught a little piece of you in it. It took only one episode like that to convince you to never let it happen again. Next time you had a strategy: start flowing a split-second before you turn on the valve. But once you began to urinate the condom popped off and out came a flurry of little golden droplets at play in the wonderland, floating around and making your misfortune everybody's misfortune! And in no time at all the whole device reeked; it was an affront to the senses just sitting there.
The astronauts got used to the urine collector, though, and they got used to mopping up afterwards. But there was no getting used to the other part of the Waste Management System. Tucked away in a strange locker was a supply of special plastic bags, each of which resembled a top hat with an adhesive coating on the brim. Each bag had a finger-shaped pocket built into the side of it. When the call came you had to flypaper this thing to your rear end, and then you were supposed to reach in there through the pocket with your finger---after all, nothing falls in zero gravity---and suddenly you were wishing you had never left home. And after you had it in the bag, so to speak, you had one last delightful task: break open a capsule of blue germicide, seal it up in the bag, and knead the contents to make sure they were fully mixed! At best, the operation was an ordeal. In the confined space of the Apollo command module, your crewmates suffered, too. One of the Apollo 7 astronauts said the smell was so bad it woke him out of a deep sleep. When the crew came back they wrote a memo about it: "Get naked, allow an hour, have plenty of tissues handy."
ZOMG! (Score:4, Funny)
No, it was Alan Shepard's balls . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Um, golf balls, that is: http://www.pasturegolf.com/archive/shepard.htm [pasturegolf.com]
Being the joker that he was, I wouldn't be surprised if he took the time to take a dump and have a wank, as well.
"Hello Moon! Welcome to what humanity is going to do to you!"
Re:"Life" or "organics"? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say the timeline was something like this:
JFK: We will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade
NASA 3 months later: ok we put a man on the moon!
After small coverup
JFK: We will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and bring him back.
40 years later,
Chandrayyaan: What's this spot of organic matter on the moon?
wow (Score:4, Funny)
Wow... peer review, remember that?
Re:"Life" or "organics"? (Score:1, Funny)
I did not need that information. Nor do need to know how you believe the waste migrated from the equatorial region to the south pole.
Obligatory... (Score:3, Funny)
But it might just be a particle of preanimate matter caught in the matrix...
In other news, moons only indigenous life... (Score:4, Funny)
In other news, moons only indigenous life destroyed by rocket. Film at 11!
Re:"Life" or "organics"? (Score:5, Funny)
But there ain't no whales! So what do the whalers do, then? Tell tall tales? Sing their whaling tune? Tell me that, smart guy.
Actually, the lack of whales in space is a piece of evidence supporting the theory that there are whalers in space.
Re:"Life" or "organics"? (Score:2, Funny)
But one aspect of weightlessness was so unpleasant was so unpleasant that even the thrill of exploration didn't make up for it. For one thing, it could be painful.... If you opened the valve too soon, some part of the mechanism was liable to poke into the end of your penis, which prevented you from urinating. And at that point, as if to confirm your worst fears, the suction began to pull you in. Now you were being jabbed and pulled at the same time, so you shut the valve, and as the mechanism resealed itself it caught a little piece of you in it. It took only one episode like that to convince you to never let it happen again. Next time you had a strategy: start flowing a split-second before you turn on the valve. But once you began to urinate the condom popped off and out came a flurry of little golden droplets at play in the wonderland, floating around and making your misfortune everybody's misfortune! And in no time at all the whole device reeked; it was an affront to the senses just sitting there.
You're speaking to the wrong audience. For most of these guys, that sounds like the closest thing to a blowjob they'll ever get.
Re:Hey look what we found! (Score:1, Funny)
Saturday night (Score:1, Funny)
"Get naked, allow an hour, have plenty of tissues handy."
Sounds like my Saturday nights. Except by "an hour" I mean "a few minutes" and by Saturday I mean every day.