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Space Science

Fifty Year Old Moon Mystery Explained 43

Posted by michael from the green-cheese dept.
ekarjala writes "This article from NewScientist.com explains that a "flash" on the moon's surface that (captured by an amateur photographer 50 years ago) was probably the result of a 20 meter asteroid hitting the moon's surface."
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Fifty Year Old Moon Mystery Explained More

Fifty Year Old Moon Mystery Explained

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  • The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, 2003 @05:49PM (#5064004)

    It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)

    Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.

    Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!

    Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.

  • Link to actual photo (Score:5, Informative)

    by oni ( 41625 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @05:50PM (#5064009) Homepage
    Here's a tip for Jeff Hecht, the article's author: If you write a piece about a photograph, you *must* link to a copy of the photograph. Mkay?

    For everyone else, here it is:
    http://iota.jhuapl.edu/stuart.jpg [jhuapl.edu]

    And here's a much better story about it:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2592075. stm [bbc.co.uk]

    • Re:Link to actual photo (Score:3, Informative)

      by MBCook ( 132727 )
      I'm getting really sick of this. This is a major pet peeve of mine. It seems like more than half the time I find an article on something (especially something where a picture is NEEDED, like this) there is no picture. What is so hard about including one little picture in an article? Thanks for finding the picture for us.

      • Re:Link to actual photo (Score:2, Interesting)

        by benh57 ( 525452 )
        Agreed. 90% of "online" newspapers just replicate the print edition on the web. They really don't get it. The web is about multimedia...

        Single-picture online news articles aren't much better, thats still basically what you get in the offline newspaper. The web makes it possible to have full galleries of photos for each story, which could all be set up in an automated fashion. There is no excuse.

      • That's right up next to "Announcing a new version of SupraGlax! Version 3.8 added the five most requested features and makes life much easier!"

        Yeah, great. Mention what it does. It might as well be ceiling polish for all that I care.

  • here's the pic (Score:5, Informative)

    by MJArrison ( 154721 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @05:51PM (#5064015) Homepage
    The linked article doesn't have a pic of the impact they're talking about.
    Here's one I found over at space.com [space.com].

  • Nah (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was just NASA figuring out the light levels so best to simulate it in a warehouse in the desert.

  • where does the light come from? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zogger ( 617870 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @07:15PM (#5064414) Homepage Journal
    --I am not any sort of expert on this so I have a question I don't see addressed in the article. I can understand a large kinetic hit, the crater and debris field. Where does the "light" come from? Inside an atmosphere like ours we have an "oxidiser" allowing some burning, if I am understanding this correctly, how we see meteorites after they enter (saw a bolide hit the ocean before, very spectacular). But on the moon in a vacuum, how does one rock hitting another create the light? Flint hitting steel creates a spark because a piece of the steel is burning, and it's burning because there's O2 present. On the moon I just don't get it. I'm sure there's an answer, I just don't know what it is, lacking any sort of decent chemistry. Thanks in advance for anyone who can explain this simply.

    • Re:where does the light come from? (Score:5, Informative)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Saturday January 11, 2003 @07:35PM (#5064484) Homepage Journal
      All that energy become heat - and heat often radiates as light. Many types of substances will emit light when excited, even in a vacuum. Look at any lightbulb for an example, or even the classic vacuum tubes.

      A metor slamming into rock would easily produce enough energy as heat to produce a flash. (Many other things that produce light without oxygen - I *think* bioluminecence, plus glow sticks, but certainly things like nuclear reactions, which produce quite a bit of light without oxygen being involved. We sophisicated types refer to this as 'daylight'. ;) )

      --
      Evan

    • Re:where does the light come from? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @07:38PM (#5064497) Journal
      This is easier to answer than you might expect. When you have a rock hit the surface of the moon at a relative velocity of many kilometers per second, a good bit of the asteroid's kinetic energy gets converted very rapidly into heat. We're talking about energies on the order of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT here. For a short period of time, part of the surface and some of the ejected matter will glow white hot, hence the 'flash'.

    • Re:where does the light come from? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @08:47PM (#5064720)

      I would bet that the 'flash' was just a dust cloud, illuminated by and reflecting sunlight.

      This is why: look where the incident occurred - right on the demarcation between light and dark. (It has a name, but I forget what it is.) Anyway, the area around the impact is dark due to the moon's position relative to the sun. The shadows fall at ground level, but the cloud from the impact presumably rose some distance above the moon's surface; I believe it went high enough that sunlight could strike it. Look at the craters along the [light-to-dark line] for other examples: the upper edges of some crater rims are in sunlight while the surrounding areas are dark. If the impact had occurred completely on the light side or completely on the dark side I don't think anyone would have noticed.
    • Isn't the light just the reflection of the sun light coming from the dust cone that get's blown into space ?
    • When stuff gets hot, it glows.

  • Flashes from mars! (Score:3, Funny)

    by JohnFluxx ( 413620 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @08:48PM (#5064724)
    Oh no, bright flashes observed from mars?

    Oh wait, the moon, thank god.
  • It took them 50 years to formulate this answer?

    • "It took them 50 years to formulate this answer?"

      Uh, can we get back to you on that one?

  • Is there a "before" photo? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's common in astronomy to be able to back to earlier photos and see what was there and what changed since. Much research benefits from this abaility.

    Does there not exist someplace a pre-1953 photo of that area of the moon? Ideally several, which could narrow down the time to a window that the "flare" fits.

    It'd help make the case. And it'd just be neat to see before & after pictures.
    • Does there not exist someplace a pre-1953 photo of that area of the moon? Ideally several, which could narrow down the time to a window that the "flare" fits.

      No "before" pictures. The BBC article [bbc.co.uk] mentioned by another says "But ground-based telescopes were not powerful enough to see any crater."
      Of course, that is why astronomers couldn't announce the new crater the next day.

  • Other recorded lunar impacts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Viadd ( 173388 ) on Sunday January 12, 2003 @05:40PM (#5068797)
    In 1999 and 2001, I and other amateur astronomers recorded the flashes [jhuapl.edu] from Leonid Meteors hitting the Moon. These flashes [speakeasy.org] were videorecorded and confirmed by multiple observers simultaneously.

    The meteors in these cases were in probably in the 10 kg range, and the craters they produced were probably a few meters across (not large enough to see from the ground or any lunar orbiter we are likely to launch any time soon).

  • Did anyone consider sending a L.E.M. to this site? Would there have been any trace of this explosion that Borman could have found in a weekend's hiking?

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