Moon bombing

[David Dee.]

June 17, 2009 | 411 comments
NASA's mission to bomb the Moon
NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet. The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole. Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.



NASA's mission to bomb the Moon



NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet.

The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole.

Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.

The attack on the Moon is not a declaration of war or act of wanton vandalism. Space scientists want to see if any water ice or vapour is revealed in the cloud of debris.

Though the Moon mostly a dry airless desert, they believe ice could be trapped in crater shadows near the south pole which never receive any sunlight. If so it could provide vital supplies for a manned moonbase.

Last year, British scientists identified regions where water might be found on the Moon and estimated that there could be enough to fill one of Europe's largest reservoirs.

The spacecraft will not head straight for the Moon. First it will orbit the Earth a number of times while its precise target is identified. Finally, it will send the missile into the Moon at twice the speed of a bullet on October 8.

The shepherding spacecraft will follow close behind, taking pictures and analysing the ejected debris as it looks for evidence of water. It has just four minutes to do this before it crashes into the Moon itself, producing a spectacular explosion that should be visible in amateur astronomers' telescopes.

It is a busy time for Moon crashes. Last week Japan's Kaguya probe collided with the Moon at the end of its own mission.

The LCROSS mission - it stands for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite - will launch on an Atlas V rocket together with another spacecraft, called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The orbiter will circle the Moon for at least a year searching for potential landing sites for astronauts when they return there in the next decade. It will also look for suitable materials that might support a colony.

The dual mission was due to blast off today but was delayed to make way for the shuttle Endeavour. However, another hydrogen leak means that the shuttle launch has now been delayed until next month.

Picture: An artist's impression of LCROSS missile being fired at the Moon. (NASA).

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PEACE, LOVE & LIGHT ☽✪☾♡ ☼ Mr.Dee.

[Maggie Harris]

So....Nasa bombed the moon! What's next??? When oh when will some other intelligence make themselves known to this warrior planet that we are being watched and that they won't tolerate any crap from planet Earth????

[Heather Sirotak]

Can anyone here give us some more information about India's space program and how they discovered water? I felt infuriated by this nonsensical bombing, no matter what. Obama was fully onboard with it though, encouraging the newest generation of school children to observe, as if we had never even landed there! I'm old enough to vividly remember the thrill of standing outside, looking at the moon, knowing that humans were walking there, in 1969!
Over the years, since nothing was ever said about anyone going back, I lost interest. I admit, I didn't even notice anything about the 90s mission at all, at the time, let alone pictures like this video shows! Were they kept under wraps?
My husband and I have both gone down the conspiracy rabbit hole, this past year, with so many dots connecting up, it's more like having the veil explosivly blown off than lifted from our eyes too.
He has become more obsessed with the moon than me, for a switch, with some burning questions about what's really on the dark side and why it doesn't spin like other planetary bodies. He isn't too quick to buy everything he sees or reads, since he was never even an avid amatuer, coming by his Moon interest second hand. It's hard to know how much to believe or who to trust, without a more scientific background. But, since seeing UFOs with our own eyes and therefore knowing the Government and NASA will hide everything, ANYTHING is obviously possible, like moon bases, whether human or alien.
After losing my sweet angel Aidan last October 13th, I'm particularly sensitive to the stories of the moon being a stopover for disincarnated souls, between lives. If I'm supposed to rendevous with Aidan, they better not be messing with his spiritual energy! I've been recently diagnosed with stage 3 and apparently aggressive, Non Hodgkins Lymphoma. I believe the shock of Aidan's passing triggered the flashover. I have chosen alternative, wholistic treatments over chemo-therapy, partly because I no longer trust anything from this Nazi NWO. Chemo is just like Shock and Awe too and it's always the Military Industrial Complex, or Big Pharma, who profit from their war games.

[Morgana]

I realise this a dated topic but it I think its shows how deep mans arrogance actually is.. The Moon is a celestial body that no one owns, so what right have they to experiment on it. Their breaking their own Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, and their actions are also contrary to space law prohibiting environmental modification of celestial bodies.

http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/gares/html/gares_21_2...

I would hardly say that blasting a bomb into the Moon would be considered as peaceful exploration and apart from the obvious realisations can you imagine the energies that was disturbed? or maybe they have forgotten link to the tides and gravity of the earth to the moon in their selfish arrogance.

What next indeed....

Maggie Harris said:

So....Nasa bombed the moon! What's next??? When oh when will some other intelligence make themselves known to this warrior planet that we are being watched and that they won't tolerate any crap from planet Earth????

[Mikayo]

(pour David)
Yes, there is Water on the Moon

Three different spacecraft have confirmed there is water on the Moon. It hasn't been found in deep dark craters or hidden underground. Data indicate that water exists diffusely across the moon as hydroxyl or water molecules — or both — adhering to the surface in low concentrations. Additionally, there may be a water cycle in which the molecules are broken down and reformulated over a two week cycle, which is the length of a lunar day. This does not constitute ice sheets or frozen lakes: the amounts of water in a given location on the Moon aren't much more than what is found in a desert here on Earth. But there's more water on the Moon than originally thought.

The Moon was believed to extremely dry since the return of lunar samples from the Apollo and Luna programs. Many Apollo samples contain some trace water or minor hydrous minerals, but these have typically been attributed to terrestrial contamination since most of the boxes used to bring the Moon rocks to Earth leaked. This led the scientists to assume that the trace amounts of water they found came from Earth air that had entered the containers. The assumption remained that, outside of possible ice at the moon's poles, there was no water on the moon.

Forty years later, an instrument on board the ill-fated Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M cubed) found that infrared light was being absorbed near the lunar poles at wavelengths consistent with hydroxyl- and water-bearing materials.

M3 analyzes the way that light from the sun reflects off the lunar surface to understand what materials comprise the lunar soil. Light is reflected in different wavelengths off of different minerals, and specifically, the instrument detected wavelengths of reflected light that would indicate a chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen. Given water's well-known chemical symbol, H2O, which represents two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom, this discovery was a source of great interest to the researchers.

The instrument can only see the very uppermost layers of the lunar soil – perhaps to a few centimeters below the surface. The scientists were looking for a signature of water in the craters near the poles, but found evidence for water instead on the sunlit portions of the moon. This was certainly unexpected and the science team from M3 looked and re-looked at their data for several months.

Confirmation came from a recent flyby of the re-purposed Deep Impact probe, on its way to rendezvous with another comet in 2010. In June of 2009, the spectrometer on board also showed strong evidence that water is ubiquitous over the surface of the moon.

Jessica Sunshine and colleagues with Deep Impact also found the presence of bound water or hydroxyl in trace amounts over much of the Moon’s surface. Their results suggest that the formation and retention of these molecules is an ongoing process on the lunar surface – and that solar wind could be responsible for forming them.

Still another spacecraft, the Cassini spacecraft while on its way to Saturn, also flew by the Moon in 1999. Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey spectroscopist on the M3 team, reanalyzed archival data from Cassini, and that data as well agreed with the finding that water appears to be widespread across the lunar surface.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: exogenic, meaning water from outside sources, such as comets striking the moon's surface, and endogenic, meaning water that originates on the moon. The M3 research team, which includes Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, suspect that the water they're seeing in the moon's surface is endogenic.

But where did the water come from?

The team from M3 believe it may come from the solar wind.

As the sun undergoes nuclear fusion, it constantly emits a stream of particles, mostly protons, which are positively charged hydrogen atoms. On Earth, the atmosphere and magnetism prevent us from being bombarded by these protons, but the moon lacks that protection, meaning the oxygen-rich minerals and glasses on the surface of the moon are constantly pounded by hydrogen in the form of protons, moving at velocities of one-third the speed of light.

When those protons hit the lunar surface with enough force, suspects Taylor, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, and where free oxygen and hydrogen are together, there's a high chance that trace amounts of water will be formed. These traces are thought to be about a quart of water per ton of soil.

"The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth," said Taylor. "Since the early soil samples only had trace amounts of water, it was easy to make the mistake of attributing it to contamination."

Lead image caption: Schematic showing the stream of charged hydrogen ions carried from the Sun by the solar wind. One possible scenario to explain hydration of the lunar surface is that during the daytime, when the Moon is exposed to the solar wind, hydrogen ions liberate oxygen from lunar minerals to form OH and H2O, which are then weakly held to the surface. At high temperatures (red-yellow) more molecules are released than adsorbed. When the temperature decreases (green-blue) OH and H2O accumulate. Image courtesy of University of Maryland/F. Merlin/McREL


Extracting Water from the Moon with Basic Home Appliances
Here's an article that talks about how astronauts might extract water from the Moon in the future...
Two scientists have cooked up a way to get water and oxygen from the moon. And to test their idea, they used a basic kitchen microwave oven. "This is exploration," said Dr. Bill Kaukler of the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Center for Materials Research. Kaukler and Dr. Ed Etheridge of Marshall Space Flight Center have proposed using microwaves to draw water from below the lunar surface. To do this, microwaves would be "shot" at the moon, likely from an orbiting spacecraft. But to test their theory, Kaukler and Etheridge didn't build an elaborate test site. They just put a plate of simulated lunar regolith in a microwave oven and "nuked" it for a few minutes.

Kaukler said they were inspired by the results of 1994's Clementine mission which uncovered the possible existence of ice within some of the craters at the moon's poles. This discovery was confirmed in early 1998 by NASA's lunar prospector. Scientists believe the ice was brought to the moon the same way water was brought to Earth – by comets crashing into the surface.

"If you estimate, there would be billions of tons of water," Ethridge said.

The surface is covered by regolith, or silicate rock that is the lunar version of top soil. It's about two meters deep "and where you have silicates, you have oxygen," said Kaukler. "That makes it worthwhile to extract, and, one of the beauties of this is we don't have to dig."

Digging could stir up the fine, gritty dust. The microscopic particles then could adversely affect the astronauts' spacesuits and their equipment, he said.

To get to the water, microwaves would be shot into the regolith, "thawing" the ice to about minus-50 degrees Celsius. Water vapor would be drawn to the surface by the moon's vacuum environment. The water vapor is then collected on a plate as ice and scraped off to be used as water for the astronauts. The hydrogen and oxygen can also be separated through electrolysis to use as fuel for a trip to Mars.

In their Marshall lab, the scientists used a microwave oven, a vacuum, water and a simulant to regolith to verify their findings.

"We put some water in the simulant and placed it inside the microwave," Kaukler said. "Then, we used the vacuum to replicate the lunar atmosphere.

"We were able to get about 95 percent of the water back in about two minutes."

Other uses of microwaves would be to "melt" the lunar surface. The process would help create dust-free landing and launch sites as well as smoother floors for structures and roads for traveling without kicking up dust.

"For surface site preparation, the microwaves would melt the top layer, glazing it, so it's not all dust," Ethridge said. "It would create a cobblestone effect."

So if the moon had water, oxygen and useable real estate, it might be a financially viable place to colonize.

"Since we're planning to go to the moon and Mars, the idea is to save weight (on the flight) and to extract the materials the astronauts would need – oxygen and water," said Kaukler. "There have been studies that showed (getting the water) to be economically viable," he said. "It could be the first commercial venture."

Source: Huntsville Alabama Times
Written by Nancy Atkinson
Source: Science

You can listen to a very interesting podcast about the formation of the Moon from Astronomy Cast, Episode 17: Where Did the Moon Come From?
http://www.astronomycast.com/solar-system/episode-17-where-does-the...
LOVE AND LIGHT, Mikayo.