How NASA Will Bomb the Moon To Find Water 280
mattnyc99 writes "A few weeks ago we got first word of NASA's plan to crash a spacecraft into the moon next February. The new issue of Popular Mechanics has an in-depth look at the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and its low-cost, lightning-fast mission prep — even if delays have pushed it to late February or early March. Quoting: 'Andrews had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F. Instead, Blue Ice and its partners at Northrop Grumman came up with a concept to bring the lunar floor out in the open.... Since engineering precision hardware would break the budget, the LCROSS team had to make existing components work together.'"
Re:Earth's Orbit? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Bombing the Moon for water? (Score:1, Interesting)
I have mod points, but I don't know whether to rate you -1 Off Topic or +1 Funny
Hopefully someone else can make the proper call as I do a quick search for Amazon moon women.
Re:Fahrenheit? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, while I'm generally in favor of the metric system over imperial, I've never cared nearly so much about the Celsius v. Fahrenheit debate.
Fahrenheit makes more sense in day to day contexts. 0 is very cold, 100 is very hot (both from a human experience point of view), and you have more precision on the temperatures in between. Now in this particular case it's so cold that it doesn't really matter; if I told you it was -184 C, or -300 F it wouldn't really change the fact that you can't conceive of the temperature as anything but "really, really cold".
Besides, who are you trying to chastise? The temperature was given in a quote from the article. Would you prefer Slashdot editors mangle quotes to conform to your prejudices?
Re:The Time Machine (Score:3, Interesting)
That is what I was thinking.
I heard a conspiracy theory that the renewed interest in the moon by NASA at the direction of George Bush was due to the discovery of Helium-3 there.
Helium-3 is a non-radioactive isotope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 [wikipedia.org]
My understanding of this is that this means is you can have fusion without radiation only dealing with heat and actually raw electricity as a by product. So it seems the energy generation is far greater than other forms of fusion. ... Or in other words.. Bush is invading the moon for a new kind of "oil".
missile testing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Earth's Orbit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Earth did have a second moon (first moon?).
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/second_moon_991029.html [space.com]
It grew up and moved out. Now it just visits once in a while.
Re:Earth's Orbit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Your computation actually has some errors in it. The amount of energy required to increase the earth's speed from what it is (about 30,000 m/s) by 1 m/s is not the same as the amount of enery needed to increase it from 0 to 1 m/s (which is what you computed, except that you also made a mistake by a factor of 2).
A better estimate (with same mass, but increasing the speed from 30,000 m/s to 30,001 m/s) yields
1.7921e29 joules needed. That's 5 orders of magnitude greater than your solution.
I once computed that to remove the top 1cm of topsoil or water from all the worlds land masses and oceans, and throw them out into outer space at escape velocity, we'd need to perfectly use the energy of 100 billions bombs like Hiroshima's. I wanted to see whether exploding a planet like the Death Star does in Episode 4 was realistic. It isn't. At escape velocity, the chunks of the planets would take 6 minutes to double the planet's volume (so the explosion would look very very slow).