So I stayed up all night to watch the LCROSS impact. I didn’t expect Michael Bay’s explosive opus on the moon or anything. I’d have been happy with a little *poof*. Y’know, kinda like standing on the cliff & watching as Wile E. Coyote hits the ground with a little puff of dust. I’d have been happy with that. What did we get? In my case, I was watching a live feed from a telescope in Arizona as well as the view from NASA which came from the vehicle trailing Centaur. Know what I saw? Nothing. Nada.

The hour leading up to the impact was hosted by 3 guys around a table. It seemed that the the guy on the left was the expert & the other two were the hosts. After the whole “impact” event the camera went back to them. Even they were dumbstruck. This was supposed to be something that could be seen from Earth with a 9″ or 10″ telescope. There were people with 32″ telescopes who didn’t see anything!

Regardless of what anyone says officially, I’m fairly sure that I detected a bit of surprise & disappointment at the event even from pretty much everyone whose face was caught by a camera. Sure, some great science will likely come of it but as a publicity stunt, it fell flat. Maybe they’ll learn that that area of the moon is deep, soft & dusty sand & centaur simply went *schoompf!* leaving little or no trace at all. My theory is that NASA has just proved that the moon really is made of cheese. Velveeta.

I can’t believe I woke my wife and kids for this.

-Jon

Continue reading "What was THAT?!?" »

For those who don’t know, NASA will be smashing stuff into the moon in the morning. It should happen at 4:31am PST. The impact(s) should send enough moon dirt high enough to be seen from earth with a pretty good telescope. Now if, like me, you don’t have a good enough telescope you can watch online! Here are a couple of places you can go to watch:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

http://www.slooh.com/special_feed.php

Want to know more about the whole thing in general? Here are NASA’s site & the LCROSS Project site:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/index.html

http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/

Why, you may ask? Well, they have many good scientific reasons for doing this. They hope to learn more about the moon and they’ll be looking to see if they kick up water as well. Of course, in every interview I’ve read with these brilliant, brilliant people they give all of the wonderful scientific reasons. Very eloquently, in fact. In the end though, no matter how professionally the q & a goes, it always seems to come down to one thing, even for the NASA Scientists. You can practically see their faces light up through the printed word when they start talking about the actual act of what they’re doing. They’re flinging stuff at the moon! THE FREAKING MOON! Sooooo cool.

-Jon

Continue reading "The freaking MOON!" »