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Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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Crashing into the Moon
April 10, 2006 5:21 PM
Important note to all residents of the Moon: in the fall of 2008, you don't want to be anywhere near Shackleton Crater near the lunar South Pole.
That's where the upper stage of an American rocket is expected to go crashing. A 5,000-pound rocket shell, moving at something like 5,600 miles an hour, makes quite a mess--and a probe called LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) will be 15 minutes behind it, shooting video and taking measurements until it crashes itself.
"We wanted this bad," said Tony Colaprete, the Principal Investigator from NASA's Ames Research Center in California. I just got off the phone with him. He heads the team that thought up this scheme, beat out 18 other proposals (see my previous entry below), and now has two years to make it work.
(NASA computer visualizations of the LCROSS booster heading for lunar impact, while the spacecraft follows. Source: Ames Research Center, Mountain View, Calif.)
Why blast a thousand-foot hole in the Moon? To see what's inside, of course. NASA is especially interested in the theory that sunlight hits Shackleton Crater at such a shallow angle that parts of it are perpetually shadowed by the crater's rim--so there's no light or heat to melt ice that's likely to have collected there over the eons.
And why crash a spent rocket there? Other teams suggested instrumented probes that would crash, but Colaprete and his team decided to try for a twofer.
"We all sat and brainstormed, and someone said, 'Why don't you throw the upper stage of the rocket at it?'" said Colaprete. "And that idea sort of got buried, but a couple of us kept it alive."
The notion of ice near the lunar South Pole first came up in the 1990s, when two small probes detected chemical signatures of hydrogen in the lunar soil, but if LCROSS works, it will confirm that the hydrogen is part of H2O--water. Useful stuff if you're an astronaut. The water can be chemically broken up to make oxygen for breathing, and hydrogen--light in weight and highly volatile--for fuel.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. If the mission succeeds, says Colaprete, and their probe gets to photograph its own booster crashing ahead of it, "It's going to be spectacular."
(I've written a piece for our home page, which you can find HERE. And NASA has material HERE.)
--Ned
April 10, 2006 | Permalink | User Comments (6)
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I didn't think the moon was a planet!?!
Posted by: Steven Whetstone | Apr 10, 2006 6:45:58 PM
I am a retired quality inspector and worked on all of the Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyez and the first 113 shuttle missions at Kennedy Space Center. In my humble opinion, the present scientific/government and political atmosphere will be unable to return manned flight to the moon during this projected timeframe. I do not believe that the nation will be able to produce a rocket with the power of the Saturn 5 and the facilities to service and launch same. We dismanteld the Launch Umbilical Towers and completely changed the Pads & VAB for space shuttle. Earths diameter and mass has not changed and the laws of physics remain constant. Unfortunately we did not take advantage of the Saturn 5's which are now on display at KSC, Texas & the Smithsonian. Point being, you have to have a rocket with enough thrust to take a sizable mass to 25,000 mph to get to the moon (earth-moon escape velocity). The money and political willpower no longer exists for moon "stations" to be undertaken during the next 25 years. The shuttle was a mistake and everyone who had worked on Apollo knew it and if Werner VonBraun had lived it would have never been attempted.
Posted by: Jim Baker | Apr 10, 2006 11:44:26 PM
The moon isn't a planet. Good article though. Might want to fix it before you get too many flames! :P
Posted by: rdas7 | Apr 11, 2006 10:54:44 AM
Great coverage, Ned! I just hope that there's no incident which would cause a setback.
Posted by: chuck | Apr 11, 2006 12:47:18 PM
Hi In Japapn this topic slipped out of news.But there's a few query.Maybe impact.Shocking news.
Posted by: Jenny Nakamura | Apr 21, 2006 9:09:24 AM
This is outrageous, i am sorry but this is absolutely outrageous... how can this be justified??
No way should this be able to be done, not for any reason and how would you go about stopping it!?!
Lacunae.
Posted by: Tanya-C | May 17, 2006 11:38:51 PM
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