But I am not quite giving up yet. I took 10 minutes of video of the Moon. There is computer software that can search frame by frame to find the best images in the set. I will be working with my video this weekend to see if anything shows up with some more processing (unfortunately, busy at work today so I can't justify spending time on that here...next trip is on Monday morning!)
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This Friday morning, October 9th, at 4:30am PDT, the Moon is going to take a hit for science. The LCROSS mission (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) will impact a crater near the Moon's south pole.
There will be two impacts. The first one (which is the upper stage of the rocket that sent the mission on its way) will impact first and kick up a bunch of dust and debris. A few minutes later, the second spacecraft, known at the Shepherding Spacecraft, will fly through the debris with a suite of sensors before it crashes into the Moon as well. Although we stand to learn a lot about the composition of the Moon from this, the real goal is to find water (the Apollo missions landed near the equator so they couldn't do this when they were there).
You might be able to see this with a small telescope. I am going to be out with an 11 inch telescope and video camera optimized for astronomical recording to try and get it (well, I hope to...its a brand new scope that has not been tested or even put together yet...I know you are supposed to practice in advance and all that but we just got the scope and timing requires that the first test is live!) If I get anything interesting, I will post it here.
If you don't have a telescope, the good folks at Slooh will give you a chance to watch online. 
Slooh is a network of remote telescopes that you can watch as they take data live. Most of the time you have to pay to do this (a yearlong membership is a very reasonable $50...they have a telescope in the Canary Islands which is ideal for early evening observing in the entire U.S.). For this event, they are using a telescope in New Hampshire and one in Arizona to webcast the event. You can watch the webcast here.
So set your alarms early for Friday morning to catch this unique event.
Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicst Blog.
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11 comments:
How cool to be able to crash things into the moon.
I'll be on my way to work at that time of day and will miss it. :(
Hope you get something to share, hale.
I don't know. I think messing with the universe is scary. I know there are a million safe guards but 'what if' something goes awry? I think we should just stay here on earth and destroy it ourselves. We seem to be doing a good job of it. I know that wondering what is out 'there' and dreaming about it but can't we just look and think about it? Needless to say I am not for all the space travel that is happening. Obviously I am one of a very few.
Well, Sassa, you needn't worry about this one. This is a pretty small impactor in the scheme of things. Nature has been whacking the Moon with MUCH bigger objects for about 4 billion years and everything is just fine :)
God forbid the thing turns around and 'accidently' hits Afganistan. Immediately after we bring our boys home. Or Iran.
:D
I was just reading on the net about this when I saw that hale updated this blog. Did you know that there were people opposed to NASA "bombing" the moon? They even had an online petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/demand-nasa-halt-bomb-testing-on-moon.
I know it's too late to prevent it this time, but I think I'll sign up to help stop future bombings. Sooner or later we're going to disturb the Mole Men who live inside of the moon, and then there will be hell to pay.
We got up early to watch although there wasn't a lot to see. Exciting though.
Yes, I did see that Orbs. People who have no clue what is actually being done. There was no "bomb" just an impactor...and one that was relatively small compared to all the meteors that routinely hit the Moon.
Maybe they should start a petition against nature to tell it to stop smacking stuff into the Moon!
And why do we care if there is/was water on the moon? By spending billions of dollars is the moon going to feed the starving kids in the US?
Ahhh... the anti-climax. They are saying they collected good info though. I guess the whiz bang is less important, yet still disappointing. :(
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