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Moon NASA

Apollo 16 Booster Impact Site Found (asu.edu) 65

Posted by Soulskill from the what-you-leave-behind dept.
NormalVisual writes: After decades of mystery, the lunar impact site for the Apollo 16 S-IVB third stage has finally been found. These boosters were directed to impact on the Moon beginning with Apollo 13 in order to allow scientists to learn more about the Moon's inner structure by measuring the effects of the collisions with lunar seismographs. Five boosters were directed into the Moon during the lunar missions, and the other four impact sites had already been found shortly after the missions themselves. The Apollo 16 booster had been difficult to find because of a loss of radio contact with the booster before the impact, and the actual impact location was 30 km away from the original estimate.
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Apollo 16 Booster Impact Site Found More

Apollo 16 Booster Impact Site Found

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  • And it starts (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Lawyers all over the earth are filing lawsuits for damages today.

    • Re:And it starts (Score:5, Funny)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:21AM (#51056791)

      Lawyers all over the earth are filing lawsuits for damages today.

      And the judges rule that the cases have no legal standing. They have no jurisdiction over the moon, and instruct the attorneys to seek the correct court on the moon in which to file for proceedings.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        And someone starts a Kickstarter campaign to send all the lawyers to the moon.

        The funding goal is reached in 24 hours.

    • Well, the moon is alive according to the Doctor Who episode "Kill the moon."

      Now that I made Doctor Who on-topic, any comments if this season has been better than the last one - in terms of energy and less dreariness? I have it saved but haven't had the desire to watch it yet - something I never thought I'd say.

  • Loss of radio contact? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The astronauts must have been holding it wrong. Cosmonauts would never have this problem.

  • I mean really, that's what we're most interested in.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] is pretty comprehensive. What additional info were you looking for?

  • But conspiracy theory (Score:3)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:23AM (#51056813)

    But the conspiracy theorists all tell me the moon landings were fake... You mean to tell me there is actual evidence of us landing on the moon that we can see?

    (yes I'm joking for the humor impaired)

    • Re:But conspiracy theory (Score:5, Funny)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:29AM (#51056865)

      But the conspiracy theorists all tell me the moon landings were fake... You mean to tell me there is actual evidence of us landing on the moon that we can see?

      (yes I'm joking for the humor impaired)

      Clearly what happened is, since we all know the original landing was faked, that as technology progressed the US was finally able to build rockets powerful enough to get to the moon, so they left these behind to later claim them as "proof" that the original claims were true.

      Either that or: I'm not saying it was aliens...but it was aliens.

    • Of course this is a conspiracy. See what you really see is not from Apollo. It's the spacecraft that brought Obama to this planet. The liberal media will tell you he's an alien from Kenya but he's really an alien from outer space specifically, Arrakis. The entire Apollo program was a cover for his landing created by his dad, Jango Fett. Together with the Knight's Templar and the Masons, they made the entire world think it was some sort of space exploration program. It was all too easy.
      • uh-huh, uh-huh, I see... uh-huh...

        How do I subscribe to your newsletter?
    • No, just photoshop. Obviously. I mean, have YOU PERSONALLY ever seen these moon craters with your own eyes? Or only from The Man's "pictures of the moon?" Know your source.

  • Well, I thought I had been following the space program pretty closely all these years. I was a little kid in the 60's so I got to watch the early space program develop in real time. But I had never heard of these experiements until today. A few years ago, when the Indians crashed their probe into the moon, I thought, "What an interesting experiment. I wonder why we never thought of that." Turns out, we did think of that. Of course, the two experiments differed in what they were looking for, but they w

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Turns out, we did think of that. Of course, the two experiments differed in what they were looking for, but they were alike in that someone said, "Hey, let's crash something into the moon in order to learn something more about it."

      Apparently it's a universal human trait to wonder "What happens when we hit X with Y really hard/fast?". This trait also probably led to the evolutionary dead end of "hey, watch this!"

      • Whatta ya mean evolutionary dead end? As far as I can tell, its still a dominant trait within the species ...

      • Apparently it's a universal human trait to wonder "What happens when we hit X with Y really hard/fast?".

        Perhaps it is related to procreation in some way.

      • Apparently it's a universal human trait to wonder "What happens when we hit X with Y really hard/fast?". This trait also probably led to the evolutionary dead end of "hey, watch this!"

        Unfortunately the "Hey, watch this!" procedure ends often enough with an (inebriated) "hitting that" that the "Hey, watch this!" genes get passed on to the next generation, before that last final great "Hey, watch this! It's going to be effing AWESOME! (Hold my beer!)"

    • One of the major logical flaws that moon conspiracists have is that their narrative is that the US "suddenly" went to the moon in 1969. This ignores the history of the space race. Both the US and the USSR made small incremental steps along the way. The US seemed to focus more on experiments and science exploration. In my opinion, this is how the US leapfrogged the USSR to the moon. While the US was beat initially, they had a more coherent program that took longer. The USSR skipped many of the smaller miles

      • One of the major logical flaws that moon conspiracists

        Is that logic has nothing at all to do with it.

        The reality is, these kind of conspiracy people are going to believe whatever stupid shit they've convinced themselves of ... and logic, evidence, proof, common sense, or anything which refutes their stupid notion is something they will just simply not accept.

        Certain kinds of beliefs are no longer subject to logic. And the it becomes so utterly pointless to try to change their mind that there is no point.

        Ir

      • Re:I did not know that (Score:5, Informative)

        by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @02:47PM (#51058811) Homepage Journal

        A good example is with the PLSS (personal life support systems) used by Apollo astronauts. These systems were small versions of the life support system in their vehicles, they filtered CO2 from the air. The Russian systems were more like SCUBA gear and could only operate for a short time. Russian plans for operation on the moon showed that the astronauts would have to be tethered to their vehicles most of the time, while US astronauts did eight hour EVAs and drove 20km across the surface in a day.

  • How about a Moon rover? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by k6mfw ( 1182893 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:49AM (#51057015)

    It would be interesting to see what this impact site looks like up close, in significant detail like Mars rovers (we got plenty of those). Is there any significant piece of metal or because of impact energy it exploded like a high powered bomb where entire third stage is bits and pieces scattered over miles. Probably most interesting is the soil, be able to look at fresh soil that hasn't been exposed for millions of years. Also what would it look like up close on impact (i.e. a GoPro on a tripod near impact site). A lunar rover can go to all these interesting places like landing sites, take a close up of what solar radiation does to materials over past 45 years. Unfortunately Mars Underground folks hijacked the space program setting most resources to bypass the Moon and go straight to Mars.

    Speaking of Apollo 13, the third stage impact was the only planned objective accomplished by that flight. Geologists were very interested to see how much the Moon shakes. They did alert the crew good data was measured by seismographs left by Apollo 11 and 12, though crew probably didn't give it that much thought as there were more pressing matters to deal with.

    • My guess based on the description is that it would look like a crash site and the nature of the impactor would be fairly obvious. The booster would be largely intact, but distorted like a crushed coke can.

      • The booster would be largely intact, but distorted like a crushed coke can.

        I don't think so. If you read TFA you would discover that this thin hollow aluminum shell is hitting the Moon at the relatively slow (as hyper-velocity cosmic impacts go) of 2.3 km/sec. This makes it almost twice as fast, with four times the kinetic energy per gram as the muzzle velocity of the famous .220 Swift hyper velocity round [wikipedia.org] which was long the highest velocity production bullet in the world. When a bullet going this fast hits something hard (like the ground) it explodes into fragments.

        The impact ene

  • Sanford's great grandson is going to be salvaging that stuff someday.

    So... salvage laws... wonder if maritime laws will be extended to space someday?

  • Hey, empty booster, 1/6 gravity, how much fuel would they have to hold back? Would just take a little clever coding on those tiny 8-bit cpus but they had people who knew how to write native machine code back then, by golly.
    Oh and some landing legs....

    • um...no (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The SIVB stage expended essentially all its fuel pushing the CSM and LM to the moon, the only options for the stage were: crash it into the moon, or let it become a wandering HUGE bit of space junk that would periodically cross the Earth's orbit over the decades ahead. After Apollo 11 left a seismometer on the moon, it made sense for the following missions to crash the stages, generating artificial "moonquakes" which could be measured on the remotely-monitored seismographs to get a little more science for t

  • Old news. (Score:4, Funny)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @12:04PM (#51057633) Homepage Journal

    Here is an image of the impact site [wikimedia.org].

  • Clarification (Score:3)

    by NormalVisual ( 565491 ) on Friday December 04, 2015 @12:56PM (#51058033)
    The other four impact sites weren't found right after the missions themselves as the summary says. They were also found by the LROC team, just more quickly because they had a better idea where to look for them. I noticed that as soon as I hit "Submit". Sorry guys, I fail at reading comprehension.

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