h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why on earth is Nasa bombing the moon.

Doesn't the moon control the tides on earth?

I am going off tosee why thet are doing this.

Christiane

AlsoRan80

Friday 9th October,2009 12.23

Just watched. the very beautiful memorial service for Iraq. ,

They're doing to raise a cloud of dust. They will then be able to analyse the dust to see what it is made of. This is much easier to do than sending a digger up to the moon to dig down below the surface, and it doesn't do the moon any harm - the moon is hit by much bigger explosive objects regularly - that's why it's covered in craters.

What they're really looking for is water mixed in with the dust. If they find it, it means they'll be one step closer to building a manned station on the moon. At the moment they can't send people up there for long because they need water and it costs too much to carry water up. If they can use the water that is already on the moon, that's one problem solved.

Dear Gnoman,

Thank you so much for giving me that explication. I am not sure that I think it is a good enough reason.!! This admission probably makes me lousy explorer and inventor material.

Well, I am still dubious that it is necessary to get to the moon. It is blissful to look at it's reflection on/in the calm sea at night when I am gazing across to France from my reclining chair/bed !!

For the first time yesterday I actually saw the cliffs of France, so my brain exercises for the Temporal stroke are improving my eyesight,.

I believe that, - though it could possibly not be the Real reason.!! My hearing is also getting better, Though probably most doctors would laugh in my face. !!

with a great many thanks for helping me accept NASA "bombing" the moon. !! !!

Christiane
AR80
Friday 9th October 2009 13 25 BST

It wasn't actually a bomb, just a piece of space rocket.

It was an empty space rocket. !!

But it could still have done - may still do - a heck of a lot of harm. Or am I being totally alarmist. ?

I just do ot think you go messing around with the beautifully romantic moon.. Maybe the moon is filled with fiery liquid and that is why there are so many pock-marks on it?

I must go and have some lunch.

Keep well,

CME
AR80
9/10/09 13.52 BST

The moon is no longer filled with fiery liquid. It all cooled down billions of years ago. The pock marks (craters) are caused by space rocks crashing into the moon, mostly a long, long time ago when there were many space rocks around. You don't see such marks on the earth because the normal processes of erosion have worn them away over time, but you can still see one or two:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicouagan_crater

Very dear Gnomam - the ghost thereof!!

Thank you for bringing your bonkers old friend down to earth,

very comforting that,

Have a great weekend. You deserve it because you have cheered me up no end, !! and of course taught me lots and lots,. And thanks for the link.

CME
AR80

Friday 9/10/09 14.45 BST

Also, this is not the first time we've crashed things into the moon. Every Apollo mission after Apollo 11 we crashed the final stage of the Saturn rocket into it. We put seismic sensors up there and we were able to get an idea of the moon's internal make up because of the vibrations caused by the impact. I scan images of the moon every day. I can tell you this, it looks much prettier from here than it does up close. It's all just grey dust and craters.

Count Zero

Apparently the crash landing wasspectacularly unexciting!

A

Does this mean it won't become the 'Park and Ride' to the Restaurant at the end of the Galaxy?

My dad was up early to watch it live on NASA TV. He said they showed it approaching but right before impact the screen went blank white.

>>> Does this mean it won't become the 'Park and Ride' to the Restaurant at the end of the Galaxy?

Maybe not a park and ride as such. The moon's gravity well is more shallow than Earth's, but it still requires some oomph to escape. Perhaps we can use one of the Lagrangian points, maybe L5, for the park-n-ride, because car-pooling to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a very eco-groovy idea, and L5 has a more shallow gravity well.


Happy Nerd

You're not kidding. The LaGrange points are very interesting, exploration-wise. The Shuttle system was a bad idea from the start.
It had three major flaws.

-It could only reach low Earth orbit (LEO).
-It was designed by committee with one part of that committee being the CIA insisting on it being able to do polar orbits (which no shuttle has done).
-It had a requirement that we use an existing launch pad from the Saturn era.

Being restricted to LEO means the shuttle could never reach Geosynchronous orbits or LaGrange points.

The polar orbit requirement built into the design costs thousands of pounds of payload capacity.

The requirement of using an existing launch pad requires that "ROLL" just after launch to align the shuttle below the external solid rocket boosters(SRBs). The original Saturn rockets were tubular and therefore the alignment of the launch pad was not an issue. The shuttle being a directionally balanced craft with the tank and SRBs on one side and the shuttle on the other, has to make a 180 degree roll just after launch. That roll uses the equivalent of roughly 20,000 pounds of payload capacity in fuel. When the shuttle program started they had choice of spending $1 billion for a dedicated launch pad or re-purposing a Saturn launch pad. Over the three decade life of the shuttle, that $1 billion "savings" costs the equivalent of several satellites per year that could have been launched as payload.

Dear Count Zero,

Does this mean that this latest "hit" on the moon is a renewed attempt to "rediscover" the moon in a more efficient manner?

Thank for your input.

Go well,

Christiane
AR80
Sunday 11th October 2009 8.53 BST

I think I'm with your initial reaction Christiane, and future centuries of mankind will look rather scathingly on our sophiscated methods of crashing stuff into stuff to see what happens....

Bit like how we currently view some early archeaologists.

Christiane it's seems rather extreme way of finding water but they got no positive results and it's rumoured to have costed billions. I am sure there is a better and more efficient way rather than the ham fisted method used by NASA.

Katrine

NASA are constantly extremely short of money, so I'm sure the method they used was the cheapest one by far. The alternative method, of landing a robot on the moon and getting it to dig, would have cost ten times as much.

I would have thought that they would have had the decency to ask the rest of the world if it was OK to do that, after all, we all share the sme moon
After all, they kept us all in the picture back in the 60s when they landed on it

Smudger.

They've been dropping things on the moon for years! Why the sudden concern now?