NASA to fly a rocket booster into the moon

Source: www.siliconvalley.com...

In an unprecedented scientific endeavor — and what may be one of the coolest space missions ever — NASA is preparing to fly a rocket booster into the moon, triggering a six-mile-high explosion that scientists hope will confirm the presence of water.

The four-month mission of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will be directed from NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, is to discover whether water is frozen in the perpetual darkness of craters near the moon's south pole. As a potential source of oxygen for life support and hydrogen for rocket fuel, that water would be a tremendous boost to NASA's plans to restart human exploration of the moon.

Just came by this article and have to say im a little disappointed with NASA.
Is it really necessary to blow up part of the moon to find water?

I thought the moon would have been protected from this sort of vandalism.
Any thoughts anyone?

A thread about this topic is already going on here

And how can you say this as vandalism? It is research.

what if the impact throws the moon slightly out of orbit (faster escape)?

Who knows, they could just as easily GO TO THE MOON MANUALLY and dig or plant some sort of device but NOOO they're DOOMING US ALL
Damn "Fuel leaks"

"Oh no!!!!!"~ Mr. Bill

i agree this is crazy who the f*ck do they think they are that they can go ahead with an experiment that i think most of the world would disagree with.

also makes it very interesting when take in the theory's of whats actually up there on the moon. may they are actually blowing it up for other reasons than to find water.

Originally posted by Ssemaje Jhrvys
what if the impact throws the moon slightly out of orbit (faster escape)?

The moon has a mass of 7.3477×10^22 kg and an orbital speed of 1.022 km/s. P(inertia) = mv, therefore the moon's inertia = 75093494000000000000000 kg km/sec or
75093494000000000000000000 Newtons
The upper stage that will strike the moon is 2000 kg and the impact velocity will be 2.5km/sec. Assuming they directly targeted it to hit along the axis of the moon's orbital motion (they aren't, it's going to hit the pole and could never cause the moon to escape faster) the energy it would impart to the moon's orbital motion is a mere 5000 kg km/sec or 5000000 Newtons. That's 6.658x10^-18 % of the moon's orbital energy, in other words, completely unmeasureable and insignificant.

Who knows, they could just as easily GO TO THE MOON MANUALLY and dig or plant some sort of device but NOOO they're DOOMING US ALL
Damn "Fuel leaks"

Sending a probe that has to work in complete darkness without any line of sight back to earth is not "just as easy" by any stretch of the imagination. By the way, they crashed the more massive Saturn V upper stages into the moon on most of the Apollo missions; nothing bad happened to the moon. I fail to see what the shuttle's fuel leak has to do with this, other than delaying the launch slightly.

[edit on 18-6-2009 by ngchunter]

Thread Closed

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thanks