NASA's lunar impactor loses most of its fuel

NASA's lunar impactor loses most of its fuel

www.newscientist.com

NASA's moon-colliding probe LCROSS lost more than half its propellant late last week after a glitch caused it to repeatedly fire its thrusters to try to orient itself. But the spacecraft is still on track to complete its mission to slam into the moon's south pole in October.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.spaceflightnow.com
www.parabolicarc.com
lcross.arc.nasa.gov

What really confuses me is why LCROSS was out of contact with earth for a full 20 hours! Surely the amount these projects cost you would not let it out of contact for any great length of time

Also the article says the rocket will be crashed into the moons surface 4 minutes before the probe hits. Surely there will be residual fuel left in the rocket that will contaminate water if they do find it. Just done some looking on wikipedia and LCROSS's propellant is Hydrazine which is toxic.

CLASSIFICATION: B2; probable human carcinogen. BASIS FOR CLASSIFICATION: Tumors have been induced in mice, rats and hamsters following oral, inhalation or intraperitoneal administration of hydrazine and hydrazine sulfate. Hydrazine is mutagenic in numerous assays. HUMAN CARCINOGENICITY DATA: Inadequate. ANIMAL CARCINOGENICITY DATA: Sufficient.
[U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) on Hydrazine/Hydrazine sulfate (302-01-2) Available from: www.epa.gov... on the Substance File List as of March 15, 2000]**PEER REVIEWED**

Link

www.newscientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Thats a very good question! im temtped to email NASA and bring this to their attention! at least too see whatt hy say in response! Probably get the usual run around..theirs no conclusive evidence that gas, chemicals blah balh in 0 gravity blah blah, can and will affect living organisms or contaminate it, blah blah. lies all lies lol. m7yabe they think in less gravity, the fuel will simply seperate from water and drift out into space? god only knows...
as for the 20 huor no signal thing..could be anyting. cheap parts, made in china? spacecraft was on the far side of the moon, where signals are cut off, much like the apolloa missions?

reply to post by ziggy1706


Here's some more on the fuel and other issues.
Link

It still does not cover the problem of residual fuel, this is if there is one.

glad the show is still on

on the topic of the fuel + water + drifting through space.

you do realise the moon is about 220,000 miles away? the plume that comes off it might be a few miles high, but it deffinitelly is nothing for us to worry about unless it somehow hits a complete lucky/sweet spot and splits the moon in two.

even if the fuel dues somehow manage to drift the 220,000 miles, its still going to be like absolutely no danger, for one we have an atmosphere to get through ...and its rocket fuel ! .... when things come through the atmosphere they tend to get burned off.

roll on the big day

reply to post by boaby_phet


Hehehe, earth gets its own rings. Saturn eat your heart out.

reply to post by an1mal


now that would be hella cool! If it happened though, i would not feel safe outdoors unless i was wearing a kevlar helmet >.

reply to post by boaby_phet


You missed the point i was making

I was on about contamination on the moons surface, and contamination of the possible water that is there. Not us lol.

reply to post by refuse_orders


again, if their is water, its moon water .... all the way over on the moon! if we go in the future to the moon i doubt their just going to go and fill buckets to take and use as needed, even if it is "water" it might not be as watery as it is here , maybe its just mud .. maybe its just dust .

reply to post by boaby_phet


Yes, but why would they contaminate the possible water there needlessly. It makes no sense...

Just because nobody lives there does not mean anyone has the right to potentially pollute the area with a carcinogen.

Aw...come on, it's only the moon....haven't you ever thrown grease from your kitchen over the neighbors fence? It doesn't hurt anything. They usually won't even notice until you start throwing the carcasses over there.
Pollute first, ask questions later. It's the American way.
But you HAVE to admit, a little bit of mess on the moon is certainly worth the effort, right?




Don't MAKE me come up there.

Originally posted by KSPigpen
Aw...come on, it's only the moon....haven't you ever thrown grease from your kitchen over the neighbors fence?

quote of the day dude!


personaly, i believe that once we waste however many millions (Well, when i say we, i mean usa.. which im not a part of) just to find out theirs a bit of dampness their, we shoudl actualy intentionally polute the moon with all the crap we are littering earth with, i mean, if we ever go their we are going to have to live /work in massive biospheres as their is no atmosphere (or, a very thin one), so the ecology of the moon or whatever is poluting it wont matter, because its outdoors, and we will be indoors.


its a small planet size rock thats just doing nothing, we are complaining about where to put our waste ect ... instead of wasting all this money on recycling, they could have developed a type of barge or large rocket for dumping our rubbish their! i know this wont make the eco lovers happy, but its the freeking moon, apart from controling our tides and occasionaly blocking out the sun its got no other purpose till someone spends the money to mine it, and even then the minings gonna make a mess of it, so they be as well use the dark side as landfill (so we dont see it)

reply to post by boaby_phet


I wonder if shipping all of our garbage up there, could speed up some sort of terraforming, or something...I guess garbage wouldn't decompose on the moon, huh? Geez, I think we better try that out. How great would that be? Clean this place up and turn that one into a paradise. I can't wait.

Originally posted by refuse_orders

What really confuses me is why LCROSS was out of contact with earth for a full 20 hours! Surely the amount these projects cost you would not let it out of contact for any great length of time
...

Surely you jest.

This is NASA you're talking about.

September 30, 1999 Web posted at: 1:46 p.m. EDT (1746 GMT)

(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.

For that reason, information failed to transfer between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft.

"People sometimes make errors," said Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science in a written statement.

CNN




[edit on 26-8-2009 by RoofMonkey]