AI: It’s a Marvelous Night for a Moon Crash
Man, I just love crashes and explosions. And NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite is scheduled to crash its Centaur upper-stage rocket into the lunar surface at 7:31 a.m. EST tomorrow morning. Four minutes later, the LCROSS itself will follow, diving through the debris plume caused by the first crash, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before crashing into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole. The idea is to find the presence of water in the moon’s soil.
The Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are in position to watch, and photograph, the collisions. And hundreds of telescopes on Earth also will be focused on the two plumes.
NASA is encouraging amateur astronomers to join the watch party. If you don’t have a telescope, or you live in areas where daylight will obscure the viewing, NASA TV will broadcast the crashes live. Coverage begins at 6:15 a.m. EST Friday.
How many amateur astronomers in the house? Will you be watching? Or is that cutting into your beauty sleep?
The Afternoon Inquisition (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Skepchick community. Look for it to appear daily at 3pm ET.
My amateur astronomy long ago was reserved for spur of the moment observations on clear nights. Trying to catch specific events is a recipe for rain far more than chance would suggest.
ME! ME! ME!!!
Granted, I’m already up at that time of day…
I live in the middle of the city, so likely not. But my dad probably will. He’ll get up at 3am just to watch a meteor shower. He’s adorable.
You’d think that since NASA was here in FL, they would have scheduled it to impact during the night here. *sigh* I guess NASA TV will just have to do.
WAIT WE CAN EDIT COMMENTS NOW?!
When did that happen. Did I miss something?
Woah. It even has a little counter! How cute!
/threadjack
Edit test. :D
Hell yeah. :) This will be my lunchtime viewing. :)
Damn. How the heck am I supposed to see that? Maybe I should fly out to CA in the mountains somewhere and watch.
I wonder, if watching this thru a telescope, will the impact look similar to the way Wile E. Coyote hits the bottom of a valley when falling from a cliff?
A tiny little *PFFFT*
I would love to watch it with my scope, but it is very likely to be raining, and that’s ten minutes after local sunrise anyway, so any debris plume would likely have been obscured by daylight anyway. :(
Holy crap. The little “Request Deletion” thing is freaking me out! It’s like a bomb timer!
Run for your lives!
/freak_outjack
730 am E is 430 am My Time… so… I will probably be asleep.
But I might just go peek outside for a second or two… depends on how much fog we are getting… I live on the CA coast.
(The edit button just helped me spell “depends” with the proper number of “e”s. Awesome!)
That’s 8:30am my time. I’m not sure, but I think the moon is long over the horizon by then.
And I start the late shift tomorrow, so I’ll probably be in bed catching up on a week of insomnia.
It’s stupid cloudy anyway.
Alarm will be set (4:30 :-P) and optics at the ready. I heard on the news this morning that you wont even need a good telescope. And it’ll be clear!!
I try to catch ISS flyovers as often as possible but I’ll be in bed hopefully fast asleep at that hour (3:15 PST) if I have anything to say about it. So don’t tell my husband – OK?
It’ll be daylight here. Sigh. I’ll have look back on fond memories of the ISS crossing and Hale Bopp. I think it was Hale Bopp. Maybe Schumacher Levy?
Memory. An increasingly illusory faculty, at least in me.
@marilove: The counter makes me think my comment will explode.
I’m almost NEVER up at that time but I will be tomorrow morning. I’ll set my telescope up outside this evening so I don’t have to fiddle with it much in the morning. It’s not very big so hopefully it’ll be powerful enough to view something. If nothing else I’ll also be streaming NASA TV on my laptop so I’ll see it there.
BOMB THE MOON!
@faith: 4:31 PST but still nasty early.
@James Fox:
That’s usually about the time I’m getting in from the night out anyway, so I’m good.
I’m going to the observing event at the Newseum. If I manage to wake up and leave the house in time.
@Mark Hall: You just reminded me:
Mr. Show: Blow up the Moon!
I logged onto Facebook this morning, and saw the following from an old high school friend:
Followed by responses such as:
The sad thing is that he and I competed to see who could get better grades in science classes.
Edit: Just because I can. COOL!
@Yossarian: It’s only sad if he beat you.
Wait… but when NASA doesn’t drop a 2 ton bomb tomorrow… then… won’t that be proof that prayers and meditations work?
@Kaylia_Marie: Only sometimes. I usually came out on top. But it was always close.
Yeah, and it’ll have nothing to do with that engineer who didn’t tighten that nut or something!
I don’t have a telescope. But now I have Van Morrison stuck in my head, which is pretty cool (srsly).
And in answer to the AI, my house is surrounded by woods so I probably won’t likely get a good view of the moon. And it’s WAY to early to go any further than my porch.
So I think I’ll just get up at my usual time, make my coffee, then find the videos on the net.
If my daughter were older, I’d probably do differently. But she’s only 4, and can’t even look through the telescope without moving it.
We get up at 4:30 Sam, to get the kiddioes rousted. But living in Houston, you know we have no sky and I gave up my 12″ reflector when we moved back here from out in the booonies, where we did have sky. I’ll be watching it on NASA TV.
aww what the heck gotta try the edit button too.
Holy crap there’s a lot of woo about this thing out there. My old HS friend has also posted this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggc1-jB2lhQ
I should really be working, but this stuff is just like a trainwreck – I can’t turn away from it.
Since we live in Florida the sun will be up by then. NASA TV will be the viewing media of choice for me. This is going to be VERY cool!!
@Yossarian: geez you are correct about the idiots commenting on that. My NASA buddy calls the chevron ‘the worm’.
and does his best impression of the lady in ’13th Warrior’ saying it! :)
@Yossarian: Hmmn, good find. Positively hilarious.
Also, I notice how much the “chevron” looks like the Starfleet insignia from Star Trek. Coincidence?
What confused me though was, how could NASA bring back alien technology from the moon when they faked the moon landing in the first place? I guess some of these conspiracy theorists can’t even keep their own theories straight.
@Peregrine:
I was thinking the same thing. They even use some of the moon-hoax ‘evidence’ – like the ‘missing’ crosshatches on moon photos, etc.
Of course, if countries racing to the moon were to do so because of some alien technology, to which this symbol is related – why would they be advertising the fact? Shouldn’t they .. I don’t know…. AVOID USING IT?
Here in Denver it will still be dark enough so me and a buddy are going to give it a try. The only downside is the weather might be a bit problematic; 40% chance of snow and early morning fog probable. I’ll get up about 2:30am and have a look outside; if I see stars, we go, if I see clouds, my ass goes back to bed! If you go to the LCROSS website, they are recommending a minimum 10″ scope, which I have, but we did some calculations and this event, even at high magnification, is going to be really small. Only a few arcseconds high. I’m going to try and get some pictures so cross your fingers for me…oh wait, this is a skeptic site…luck is not a factor :)
I was planing on borrowing one of the 10-inch Dobsonians from the local observatory whilst the director but a camera on the main telescope (a 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain), but unfortunately for both of us the forecast is for very solid clouds until well after the impact.
So, I just realized that I actually blogged about this last month when India found proof of water on the moon.
Seems on topic so I’ll share: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h6uIHbXDQoZdMQept8kGCrnlNncQ
I recently got into watcing the night sky thanks to @twisst and the twitter meteor watch, seeing Discovery & ISS pass over head was v/cool. Being midday here I’ll be catching it on NASA TV.
@Tanstaafl56: I think that your NASA buddy has the logos a little mixed-up. The “chevron” is part of what we call the meatball logo. The worm logo is the NASA acronym spelled in groovy, 60’s looking typeface.
I think that even worse than the people who think we have secret alien technology are the ones who think that the LCROSS impacts could possibly throw the moon out of orbit and wreck our climate.
I would love to watch it, and I would get up at 4:30 AM to do so, no problem, but where I live the moon will be blocked by the mountains by then, so sadly I can’t see it. :(
I’m SO excited about this! I’m gonna try to stay up cuz sleep is for sissies!
I’ll have my scope and camera ready. If there is anything worth posting, I’ll have it on both my blog, and Skeptic North. If not….the I’ll tell a story about ghost-hunters
@Some Canadian Skeptic: Oh oh oh! If you write a story about ghost hunters, can you make it about ghost hunters on the moon communing with the aliens we will have killed?!!!
considering I will be at work when it hits, I will have to watch it on NASA TV. I kind of feel sorry for you mac people out there, as apparently NASA hasn’t bothered to move into the cross platform compatibility mode and is still using an embedded Windows Media Player, but only kind of.
Here in Sydney it will be 10:30pm so those of us Down Under get to watch it as well.
I will be standing in my backyard trying to catch a glimpse of it.
NASA TV is set to start recording at 4am CDT. Now trying to figure out how to capture streams from http://www.slooh.com – they’ll have live feeds from observation sites in New Hampshire & Arizona. The one scope we do have isn’t big enough to resolve the impact in any detail.
Well, I will be watching at NASA Tv. At 7:30 Eastern, the sun is already up, so I bet it is too bright for me to see the bang with my eyes.
@Yossarian: I just watched that link. My jaw is on the floor. Such astounding idiocy, I don’t know what to say.
So, being on European time it’s, what, just under an hour and a half to go now?
EDIT: Yup, the blog timestamp confirms it’s now 6-something EST.
Damn overcast skies… Saw the NASA TV link, but I would have loved to view something live…
No such luck, I’m afraid. I’ll be up at that hour, but I have no telescope or decent binoculars. :-(
Good FSM!? Someone actually is afraid becuse we’re dropping an empty booster on the moon? There’s been at least a dozen hard-landings from the Russian and US space programs, not to mention …was it Japan(?) also did that.
@QuestionAuthority: I think if you were planning to watch it live, you already missed it.
At least, if I have a half decent understanding of the way time works …
@QuestionAuthority: Oh yes. I was up at 4 am and decided to torture myself back to sleepiness by reading some “ZOMG DON’T BOMB THE MOON!!!111one!!1” websites. It made my brain sad.
Edit: testes, testes, one, two… three?
Oh, I know. I was actually already in my cube in the cube farm by the time it hit. I was more responding to the posts further up the thread.
Since I have no ‘scope, I figured that whatever NASA showed would be far better than anything I could see on my own.
The alarm went off, I stayed in bed, and it appears I made the right decision.
So what happened? Is the moon still there? Did the tides stop?
I usually don’t post, I just read what all of you wonderful folks write, but I just want to say that I am SO glad this site is here. I heard so much of that “ZOMG DON’T BOMB THE MOON!!!111one!!1” (Thank you Skept-artist, lol) crap last night from people I know who otherwise seem normal, that I had to escape to somewhere rational, and this was the place. Thanks you guys. But that stuff made me very sad too.
My ex went on a rant yesterday about “What gives us the right to bomb the moon?”
@Mark Hall,
I think there are benefits to bombing the moon, mainly that Terrorists should understand that we’re bombing the moon mainly because we can, we have no problem bombing them. If we find no water, at least we’ll send a message.