NASA moon-attack probe beams home first lunar shots NASA's new lunar probe beamed home images from the far side of the moon early Tuesday as the spacecraft eased into position for slamming down on the surface this October. The $79m Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) lifted off on June 18 along with its sister spacecraft, the $504m Lunar Reconnaissance …
It's a structure normally used to attach the payload and some electronics to the Atlas. Since it had to be there for LRO, they just packed it with a couple more electronics boxes, and viola! you have an impactor mission.
It was done on the cheap (for NASA) with lots of potential science return.
Not only abroad.
Not so long ago, I saw a post on one of the Classic Car forums from a gentleman who lives in Florida. Apparently, just up the way from where he lives, they'd built a new shopping mall adjacent to a busy highway. When deciding how to join the mall access road to the highway, some bright spark in road planning had decided that this rather cunning European thing called a "roundabout" that he'd seen on his travels and been wanting to try out would be a really good idea.
The chap who wrote the post said that fortuitously there was a tree-shaded grassed area next to this junction with a handy bench on it. His favourite afternoon pastime was to walk down there with a sixpack of beer and watch the accidents.
If you want to see what something is made of, grab the biggest hammer you can find and hit it... hard!
Works for small things (only the hammer is another small thing, done in a big thing - particle accellerators) so why not the moon? Crash something into it and see what happens.
Maybe my boss will let me do the same with the old P3 I am forced to use to access one specific network...
AC wrote:
>LCROSS is actually a neat implementation
I have a question. Won't the upper stage and so forth be full of hydrocarbons and stuff? Slamming it into the lunar surface will vaporise a proportion of the impactor, and potentially contaminate the plume, surely?
> viola! you have an impactor mission.
Shit! They're throwing musical instruments at the moon? Look out for the spectoscopic signature of that Stradivarius varnish...
"Won't the upper stage and so forth be full of hydrocarbons and stuff? Slamming it into the lunar surface will vaporise a proportion of the impactor, and potentially contaminate the plume, surely?"
No. The Centaur stage is fuelled by liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen and are in a fairly slow orbit specifically to allow time for the tanks to vent. With direct sunlight raising the stage surface temp several 100 degrees and the very low pressure in space pretty much anything volatile will "boil" off.
With a detailed parts list and a fairly low mass relative to what they hope to eject into space it should be *fairly* easy to subtract out the part of the plume supplied by the stage.
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