Twin Probes Crash Into the Moon 79
SchrodingerZ writes "After their yearlong mission to map the Moon's gravitational field, twin probes Ebb and Flow crashed into the lunar surface, ending the GRAIL mission. The crashes were controlled events, each impacting 30 seconds apart from each other. The twin spacecraft were running low on maneuvering fuel and NASA, not wanting the craft to fall on historical sites such as the Apollo landing sites, redirected their flight patterns to impart the far (dark) side of the moon. Their impact sites were named after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. 'During the news conference last week, Maria T. Zuber, the principal investigator, said the probes would be crashing into a "non-sunlit" part of the surface.' When the site becomes sunlit again in several weeks, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to take pictures of the craters the probes undoubtedly made in the lunar soil."
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And what are they gonna say if they crashed on the house of some of the men living on the dark side of the moon?
Re:Lunar Warming (Score:4, Funny)
And what are they gonna say if they crashed on the house of some of the men living on the dark side of the moon?
There are no men living on the moon. FACT!
Lunar Amazons! (Score:2)
Yes, but the Lunar Amazonian women may be really pissed!
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There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark.
Re:Lunar Warming (Score:5, Funny)
There is no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact, it's all dark. Well, that's what Floyd told me anyway.
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Mr. Gore, would you have preferred the alternative? If so, we can slam the next probe into Uranus.
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Far (dark) side? (Score:2, Informative)
The moon doesn't have a permanent dark side any more than the earth does!!!! The far side is in fact the mainly bright side during a new moon.
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The Grey Lady is senile (Score:1, Flamebait)
To see truth or accuracy in the NYT requires equal faith in Kris Kringle.
Because some infotainment publisher pushes stories you want to believe it doesn't make them accurate.
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If you RTFA, you'll see that the NYT is correct. The submitter screwed it up.
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While it does require clarification for a layperson that the impact is on the far side of the moon, that side can be considered "dark" if you are talking in terms of communication... a "dark" area in regards to communication could happen anywhere, including those bathed in light. Granted, due to confusion (like the current subject matter), the use of "dark" is probably not the best choice of words.
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RTFA. It was not on the far side.
no shit dumbass (Score:2, Funny)
Even the summary says "would be crashing into a 'non-sunlit' part of the surface" (not "side") followed immediately by "When the site becomes sunlit again in several weeks...".
Damn illiterates.
Dark != Far (Score:5, Informative)
"redirected their flight patterns to [impact] the far (dark) side of the moon."
Wrong. As TFA takes pains to explain, the "dark side of the Moon" and the "far side of the Moon" are not the same thing.
An the impacts were on the near side of the Moon, while it is dark.
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Was just going to comment on this.
The moon has days and nights, just like the Earth. Also, the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth, so we constantly see the same "side" of the moon's surface.
I think the inaccurate term "dark side of the moon" to refer to the side we don't see originally came from the idea of radio darkness (no contact possible directly from Earth), but it's a persistent phrase even after people know the difference.
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...the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth
I think we can say exactly, as it's not a coincidence that the rotations align like that, it's a stable configuration of two bodies in orbit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking [wikipedia.org]
Re:Dark != Far (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes but there's still libration [wikipedia.org]. Although the Moon's rotation and revolution periods are indeed exactly the same, its orbital speed changes slightly over each orbit. So "just about exactly" is justified too.
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The summary is wrong then. Copy-pasta of the summary at time of posting:
Apparenlty, the near side is the darker side because of the lunar maria [wikipedia.org], which
The best part of science (Score:1)
Create enormous collisions.
Watch the video.
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Remember this in the future (Score:3)
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No matter how it ends, Earth shoot first.
Nah, in 20 years when we re-release the footage we'll just use a little cgi magic to clearly show the moon shot first and missed, hitting the cantina wall behind us.
Where is the URL with the spectrographic results? (Score:1)
Maybe someone can point out which elements/chemicals they are going to seek or can detect?
Curious people want to know if Helium-3, water or even amino acid detection is in that mix.
What can they potentially see? What have the sensor ground tests revealed?
Interesting conversation at NASA: (Score:5, Funny)
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He's the drummer.
It is just me... (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's been proposed to name the entire (currently unnamed) mountain after her, but IAU rules require a person to be dead for at least three years before you can name an astronomical feature after someone. Ms Ride has priority, but must wait.
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If you're plunging your probe into a moon, where the sun don't shine, you could always name the impact crater after my brother-in-law. That would be a bit more appropriate.
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Thy crashed the probes into the site previously named after her.
Headline (Score:2)
Was not prepared for that headline this morning.
Who subscribed me to Slashdot After Dark?
Amazing coincidence (Score:1)
How likely would the probes be to crash into one of the historic sites? The surface area of the moon is, whatm almost four times that of the entire US? Oh, my, the probe fell exactly on the Quick-e-mart in SomeVille, Arizona!
The cratered side of the Moon (Score:1)
While the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth so we can't directly observe much of the far side, the Moon has no permanently "dark side" that receives no sunlight. The more obvious difference between the two hemispheres is that the far side, probably because it's more exposed to incoming space debris, is more cratered than the near side.
While crashing the space probes on the far side is much like throwing tear gas in a gas chamber, I wonder whether the far side is actually the more valuable side from a scie
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Apple maps (Score:2)
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This explains why I saw a bunch of Apple maps jokes in the previous story!
Why both on the same location, at the same time? (Score:2)
I wonder why they decided to crash both, on the very same day, on the same location.
It does not make much sense unless they already docked in orbit or are running some experiment that needs this to happen.
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I wonder why they decided to crash both, on the very same day, on the same location.
Convenience. If you have to crash two probes, may as well do it in one go.
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I wonder why they decided to crash both, on the very same day, on the same location.
It does not make much sense unless they already docked in orbit or are running some experiment that needs this to happen.
The two probes were orbiting in tandem, Flow (GRAIL B) always followed 20 swconds behind Ebb (GRAIL A). From what I understand this was actually implemented in software, i.e. the humans tell Ebb where to go and Flow follows.
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They were running some experiment that needs this to happen. Two-probe gravametric mapping only works if your two probes precisely share a common orbit at close (in space terms) distance.
Obligatory... (Score:2)
"each impacting 30 seconds apart from each other" (Score:2)
Even if it said "each impacting 30 seconds apart from THE other"
it would be twisted.
Since they were TWIN probes, if the one impacted 30 seconds from
the other, the other must have impacted 30 seconds from the one.
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You forgot to account for the wacky time dilation you get everywhere in space. The time each impacted relative to the other is entirely subjective to each.
Or the submitter screwed up the English language, and slashdot doesn't do copy-editing. Whatever.
Dark? (Score:2)
Their impact sites were named after Sally Ride (Score:1)
not to be too sensitive but... (Score:1, Insightful)
Does anyone find a little sick irony in naming a crash site after an astronaut who perished in a crash?
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Sally Ride died of cancer.
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IronSky (Score:1)
C'mon with the IronSky jokes already,
what an awful film that was