At 11:30 AM GMT October 9, the  Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will impact the Moon in a crater named Cabeus A in the South Polar region.  The impact will occur at 5,600 MPH, creating a new crater about 1/3rd the size of an American football field.  The resulting plume of debris is expected to extend up to 30 miles from the Lunar surface.

Why are we doing this?  Well, first of all, it’s fun, and secondly, NASA is attempting to see if there is any water or ice crystals mixed in the debris.

While we have been doing some scans of the Moon’s surface that indicate there is ice, an essential element to us building any sort of long-term colony on our planet’s only satellite, we do not have any definitive proof as of yet.  While a return to the Moon has been brought into question as of late, this is something we still need to know if we ever hope to go back there for an extended period.

If you have a telescope at home that lens surface is 10″ or more, you will be able to watch it happen, but somehow I doubt that is very many of you.  Gizmodo made a handy guide of how you can watch this event for yourself:

• Attend one of the many public events organized by observatories throughout the country. You can see a list of events here.
• Watch NASA TV, which will broadcast the event.
• Use Slooh, the site that lets you control telescopes around the world in your PJs. Go to this page here to get more information about it.

The event will take place at 7:31AM Eastern/4:31AM Pacific.  Below is a map of the bombing site, click for a super-sized version.

Now, here’s hoping the Moon doesn’t retaliate!

Post from: SeanPAune.com

Earth Declares War On The Moon!

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Yes, it’s true, I’m 38-years-old today, and it is also the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon.  Don’t worry, I rank the moon landing as SLIGHTLY more important than my birthday being some number of little significance this year.

So while I have a lot of rants about the current state of the United States space program that I could go off about, today just isn’t the day.  Today is the day you salute the power of the human will.  President Kennedy set a goal for us to accomplish this within the decade (the 1960’s), and we did it.

The sad thing was that after that accomplishment, it began to come clear that we were taking very much a, “Well, what next?” attitude with space exploriation.  Sky Lab orbited the planet.  The space shuttles were nice, but they left us orbiting the planet.  The Interntional Space Station?  Guess what… it orbits the planet.  I totally understand that interstellar travel is out of the question without some form of mew propulsion system, but we aren’t even done in this solar system yet.

So, now we target leaving Earth’s orbit again, and we look to… go back to the moon.  It’s like some outdated rock band decided to get together again for a reunion tour and relive the good old days!  Lets take that money and that energy and, not necessairly put a man there, but send more probes to Mars.  We’re constantly learning more and more about our closest neighbor, but it still isn’t enough.  We need to explore the (supposed) river beds, dig deeper into the soil for possible fossils, try to see just how deep the ice goes at the poles and a whole lot more.

I think it was the fact that my birthday fell on the 2nd anniversary of the moon walk that helped to contrinute to my love affair with space, but it makes me far from being an expert.  I just don’t see any particular need to return to the Moon, lets spend that money on doing something totally new instead.

Oh well, what do I know?  I’m a 37-year-old 38-year-old kook.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

The Historical Significance Of July 20th

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Over the next three years the mission will be studying 10,000 stars to try to find planets similar to Earth.  The there is that out of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, at least several thousand have planets similar to Earth that are capable of sustaining some form of life.  If all goes according to plan, by the end of 2013, we will know the answer to this burning question.

Of course, just knowing these planets exist won’t prove that they have life, and it certainly isn’t like we can hop in the car to drive over and check for ourselves.  Even with out current fastest rocket it would take 10,000 years to reach the closest star to us.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland recently conducted a computer study to see if there was any chance of life just in our galaxy, and the results surprised everyone.  According to the computer model, 361 intelligent races emerged since the creation of the galaxy, and as many as 38,000 have formed.  This is a perplexing situation as physicist Enrico Fermi created the “Fermi paradox in 1950 that simply asks,  “Where is everybody?”

I think this has always been one of the key problems with people saying there is no life in the universe other than our own.  Setting aside the insanely narcissistic aspects of such an assumption, there is no rule it says it has to be intelligent.  To me life on other worlds can be as simple as a one celled amoeba, but so long as it is alive, it qualifies as life as far as I’m concerned.

Space.com made the graphic you see to the left that shows where we are located in our galaxy.  To put it in Earth bound perspectives, we live out in the absolute boondocks.  We are the babies of our galaxy, and it is quite possible that not only were there civilizations deeper in towards the core, they may have very well died off of old age by the time we even came into being.

People say that with a lack of evidence you can’t prove something exists, but in this particular case I take the oppisite tact of saying, “prove it doesn’t exist.”  Simple mathamatical odds overwhelmingly support there is life somewhere in our galaxy.  I know everyone would like them to just pop-up and go, “here we are!”, but that just isn’t going to happen, at least not during our lifetimes I imagine.

I dare you to go outside on a clear night and look up at the stars.  When you see the sheer number of them, I would say it is darn near impossible for anyone to say, “naw, there can’t be any life out there.”  Hopefully the Kepler Mission will find something of interest, but even if it doesn’t, I can’t say I would ever stop believing there is other life somewhere out there.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

NASA Prepares To Hunt For Earth-like Planets

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Last night Earth was closer to the moon then it has been in 15 years, and this caused it to appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than normal.  While I have thought about this many times before, it came to mind again that I really wish we had more than one moon.

Call me greedy if you must, but darn it, I think it would look so cool to look up and see two of them up there.  Yes, yes, I know it would have totally changed tidal forces and so on, but it still would be nifty.

What I want to know is how we got short changed.  Here is how moons break down in the rest of our solar system.

• Mars – 2
• Jupiter – 49
• Saturn – 52
• Uranus – 27
• Neptune – 13

I mean, seriously, we only get 1?  How is this fair?  How did we get the short end of the moon giving?  Is it because our planet got life, the cosmos decided we only needed one?  Who knows, but darn it, I really want to see two moons above us.  That is like one of the corner stones of science fiction that you know you’re on an alien planet because they have more than one moon in the sky.

If you take anything away from this very random rant about moons, let it be this… Saturn is a greedy bastard.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

I Want Another Moon

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Now, call me insane, but I would think you would cut the funding from a project that isn’t working quite right, or one you haven’t even launched yet, not one that is proving far more successful than originally planned. That’s what they’re doing though by parking and deserting the Spirit Mars rover.

For those who don’t remember, Spirit was the first of two rovers we landed on Mars in early 2004. Both rovers were expected to operate for 90-days, but as of today’s date, Spirit is 1,413 days past its expiration date, and is still fully operational. True, it is currently parked for Martian winter, but that’s a scheduled outage, but we will not be “waking” it come the spring so we can save money. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) division of NASA runs Spirit and Opportunity, the second rover, and they plan to appeal the decision.

I wouldn’t be so boggled by this if we weren’t getting ready to launch another rover to Mars. As John Callas, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL, said in the above linked article, “Any cut at any time when these rovers are healthy would be bad timing. These rovers are still viable capable vehicles in very good health.” That’s the whole point to me, they’re working, leave them alone! What if Spirit sits too long and we can’t reboot it down the road? Mothball the probe we haven’t launched yet, and work Spirit and Opportunity into the ground. This like throwing away a perfectly good car for… well… no good reason. To me, shutting down the working rovers is worse than having a budget over run.

Really, I do not understand the logic behind this at all. Hopefully the JPL will get somewhere with their appeal, but since it’s the government, I’m not holding my breath. If this has to be the end of Spirit, no one can say it didn’t have a spectacular run.

UPDATED: Who knows what the real story is, but they aren’t shutting Spirit down.  Yay!

Post from: SeanPAune.com

The Demise Of A Rover

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The biggest news, literally, is the discovery of a planet 1,400 light years away in the Hercules constellation. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you… TrES-4! Soon to be a HOT vacation destination for push pins?

Why push pins?

It has the density of cork, and a surface temperature of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Bring at MINIMUM an spf-15 sunscreen.

The picture shown here is a computer rendering of the new planet as it orbits it’s sun, the streak behind it being a trail of the planet’s atmosphere. Apparently being so close to the parent star, the atmosphere gets pulled away by the gravity.

The big part of this story is the planet’s immense size. It is 70% bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. So, in short, this planet is enormous, but we will never reach it, so… oh well. Still interesting to know it’s out there.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

Scientists Find Giant Planet

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The resolution describes a dwarf planet as an object that:

* is in orbit around the Sun,
* has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,
* has not “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit,
* is not a satellite of a planet, or other nonstellar body.

This definition demotes Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet because it has not cleared the neighborhood of its orbit (the Kuiper Belt).

This decesion was reached by a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union who were meeting in Prague. As late as last week it thought 3 more bodies were going to be named to planet-status, but instead we lost a “planet”, taking the population of our solar system down to 8.

Science is an ever changing field of study, but it seems, I don’t know, sad, that we lost Pluto! It was a planet from it’s discovery in 1930 until now, and now it just seems weird now it’s just some hunk of rock out there.

See? Poor little guy! Oh well. Have fun replacing all those models, charts, and text books in schools now that teach the system has 9 planets!

Post from: SeanPAune.com

Poor Pluto

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Much more entertaining then thinking about how old I am.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

So, yeah

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First up, a new orbiter entered the orbit of Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will spend the next 4 years mapping the surface of Mars, testing the atmosphere of the planet and scouting possible locations for more rovers and human explorers.

This orbital insertion is exciting due to the numerous failures of past missions. This now puts four orbiters encircling the planet and Spirit and Oppurtunity are STILL roaming the surface. Mars is going to start looking like a NASA parking lot here pretty soon.

Now the mind blowing news comes from further out in our solar system. Saturn has 47 confirmed natural satellites and the Cassini-Huygens probe is exploring as many as possible. Today NASA announced that they have found evidence of ice plumes coming from the South pole region of the moon named Enceladus.

Why is this exciting? Well, water is one of the basic building blocks of life. The ice plumes suggest a heat source somewhere in the polar region is forcing the water that exists, already under pressure, to geyser, just like it happens here on Earth. This does make it seem possible there may be life on Enceladus. I don’t mean intelligent life, but still, life. NASA now wants to short list as a possible home to life. I am sure discussions are already happening about sending a probe directly to it.

Funny aside, the above linked article contained the funniest thing I heard all day.

“Enceladus measures 314 miles across and is the shiniest object in the solar system.”

Not sure why, but that made me laugh for about 10 minutes. Wow…it sure is shiny.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

Big Day For NASA

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We launched Deep Impact to collide with the comet named Tempel 1, a 14 km wide snowball essentially. The hope is this would give us a peak into the origins of our solar system as the comet dates from them.

Ok, here’s my question. As far as I can tell, all we did was take pictures. Most of them from a distance. According to a story on the BBC news site, scientists do think this is an exciting event.

UK planetary scientist Dr Monica Grady, from the Open University, watched a feed of the Deep Impact images sent down to Earth.

“We now have these high-resolution images and can compare this crater against natural ones. We’re going to get so much out of this.”

Why is this exciting? So we crashed something big into the comet, going at a speed of about 37,000 km/h. Of course it’s going to go *BOOM*. We spent $333 Million dollars to figure this out. I could have told them for free. Another scientist from the BBC article though says

And Professor Iwan Williams, from Queen Mary, University of London, who is working on Europe’s Rosetta mission to a comet, was also taken aback by the scale of the event.

“It was like mosquito hitting a 747. What we’ve found is that the mosquito didn’t splat on the surface, it’s actually gone through the windscreen.”

Again….why exactly is this exciting? Let me just say for the record, I am all for NASA and what it does. I am beyond stoked that Spirit and Oppurtunity have long outlived their projected 90 day lives on Mars.

I just think we could have spent this $333 million on something better. It looks like the Hubble Telescope will be shut down due to a lack of funds. Why couldn’t we have used the money to keep it running? The Hubble, despite initial problems, has proven to be a fantastic tool, providing thousands upon thousands of pictures of near and distant objects. Naw…lets spend the hundreds of millions on an object we get one use out of.

It just seems to me to be a bad use of funds in a very limited budget.

Post from: SeanPAune.com

NASA Plays Crash ‘Em Up

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