Moon Strike Not The Big Show Everyone Expected

I was glued to my monitor as the LCROSS mission unfolded and the camera refreshed as the Centaur rocket motor approached the surface of the moon, refreshing ever few seconds to bring an even tighter shot of the surface... and then...meh. I guess I was like many others around the globe who bought into the hype and expected a flare of impact and a huge dust plume! I truly hope that NASA was able to capture something of value, otherwise we're just polluting the moons surface with more space junk.

Discovery Channel:

"It's hard to tell what we saw there," said Michael Bicay, science director at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

Debris from the impact could have flown horizontally, or perhaps didn't clear the crater's rim, lead mission scientist Anthony Colaprete told reporters.

"Some luck has to come to get the ejecta to fly in the direction you want it to fly," he said.

"I'm not convinced we haven't seen the ejecta," Colaprete added. "We just have to go back with a finer tooth comb."

Bombing The Moon In Search Of Water

NASA will begin an assault on the moon this morning in the hopes of identifying water and other resources that may help to sustain a lengthy human visit or colonization, no joke! "The principle purpose is to identify if resources are there and if they are accessible," said lead scientist Anthony Colaprete, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "It's to pave the way for making decisions about where to go down the line."

The mission involves hurling a 50,817-pound empty rocket body at a crater on the moons South pole. The impact should kick up about 300,000 to 350,000 tons of material from the crater floor, of which about five tons is expected to soar past the crater's rim and into sunlight.

The entire operation will be viewed by amateur and professional astronomers and orbiting observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The best premier view will come via the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, designed and deployed for this it's only mission.

Source: Discovery Channel

Tour The Moon With Buzz Aldrin And Google Earth

The Google Earth team is launching a lunar exploration tool allowing us to explore the moon much like we can explore good ole mother earth. With Google Earth loaded you simply select "Moon" from the top tool bar as explained in the following video. The tool includes actual NASA planning charts, lunar mission videos, and detail pertaining to the lunar missions in the artifacts folder. Astronaut's Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmidtt each provide guided tours. Just in time to renew our interest in the space program and coinciding with the 40th anniversary celebrations.

Moon Landing Retraced In Real Time On Anniversary

WeChooseTheMoon.org will go live at 8:02 a.m. ET Thursday, a full 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The site will track the capsule's entire flight from Earth to the Moon, the moon landing and Neil Armstrong's walk — in real time, only 40 years later. “Putting a man on the moon really did unite the globe,” said Thomas Putnam, director of the JFK Library. “We hope to use the Internet to do the same thing.”

The site will include animated recreations and archival footage of the 4 day mission including radio transmissions between the crew. I wonder how many people will be calling in sick on Thursday?

File this under "yuck"!

When you have your sights set on putting astronauts on the moon or the red planet, you have to get creative and get stingy. NASA scientists, looking for ways to conserve and re-use are experimenting with "technology that would allow astronauts to convert both sweat and urine into drinkable water." Twenty employees of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will be sweating up a storm exercising, to generate water vapour through perspiration and respiration and donating urine as part of the test. The hope is that the hard work will allow NASA to conduct long space missions without need for resupply. All I can say about this one is, as cool as it sounds being an astronaut, this one would be the deal breaker for me! CBC story here.