NASA Aims to Look Inside the Moon

NASA Aims to Look Inside the Moon

news.yahoo.com

NASA said this week that it selected the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission from two dozen proposals. GRAIL's twin spacecraft are slated to launch around Sept. 6, 2011 and, after a few weeks of settling into orbit, map the lunar gravity field for 90 days.

Scientists hope to use the data to pick apart its insides from crust to core, much like a medical X-ray that shows the insides of a person

(visit the link for the full news article)

New said the data will be about 1,000 times better than any other measurements of lunar gravity, explaining that such data can be processed to peer beneath the moon's surface and locate any significant structures related to early lunar history.

I see a lot of talk in the John Lear forum about just how strong the gravity is on the moon. If NASA is going to spend all of this money on new craft for gravitational measurements, then one question comes to my mind.

How reliable was the original data?

Another interesting quote from Micheal New, the lead project scientist,

"The other thing that may become a little clearer will be a little bound on the size of any lunar core, if there is one."

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Am I missing something? I was under the assumtion that any solid object would naturally have a core. The way this is phrased would indicate that there is a possibility that the moon is hollow.

A strange turn of words.

reply to post by NGC2736


Hmm.
I understood that to mean that they are trying to determine if the moon has a core similar to Earth's (I.E. - solid Fe/Ni)...
It would seem an impossibility for it to be hollow...

Originally posted by defuntion
reply to post by NGC2736

 

Hmm.
I understood that to mean that they are trying to determine if the moon has a core similar to Earth's (I.E. - solid Fe/Ni)...
It would seem an impossibility for it to be hollow...

I guess you could take it either way. Still, I would have expected a less open-ended statement on the matter.

I imagine this statement will die off soon enough.