NASA moon-bomb probe strikes rich seam of fruitcake Those readers who've been following NASA's LCROSS lunar pole-prang mission, which saw a brace of spacecraft crash into the Moon's south pole earlier today, will be aware that the effort wasn't popular in all quarters. In particular the self-styled "Chicago Surrealist Movement", claiming to speak for "surrealists, lunatics, …
This is exactly like the plot of Space 1999.
Except it will be ten year's later...
And it won't be a nuclear blast that will knock the moon out of orbit, but an experimental NASA-sponsored mass driver being used to search for water...
And there is no space station on the moon...
Or Flares...
And the moon will not be knocked out of its orbit.
Other than that... this is /exactly/ like the plot of Space 1999.
"I know, I know - back to the seventies I go."
No it can't, that was a scifi from the '70s called Space 1999, not reality, you drooling retard.
Similarly, kicking Mount Everest with your foot *might* destroy it, in some kind of bizarre messed-up theory, but I don't think the risk is realistic enough to give you the right to demand nobody sets foot on a mountain ever again just because you're a scared moron.
Stop watching so much TV and fuck off and get yourself a basic science education. Then you won't have to live your life in utter moronic quivering cowardice of completely impossible things that will never happen.
"There are members of the concerned general public who are not werewolves, pagans or anarcho-primitives?"
If the K-Mart Halloween section with the little animatronic props is any indication, it's not normal werewolves we need to be concerned about, but -deluxe- werewolves, which come with a pre-ripped flannel shirt.
You heard it here first.
We, your new insect overlords, are pleased to see that you (our genetically created super war-monkey race that we have been breeding for millennia) are finally ready to help us fight our interplanetary war. Your puny life's purpose shall finally be revealed! Bu-wa-ha-ha-ha!
I can not believe the ignorance of some of these people...before they make themselves look so stupid you would think they would gather some facts first. Or at the very minimum attend a 6th grade science class.
I am shocked to know our tax dollars are spent on such people!!!!
Criticism and humor designed to ridicule and belittle people with honest fears or beliefs is a tactic often used by authoritarian regimes to create fear of disclosure which leads to what social psychologist have dubbed “a spiral of silence,” i.e., a fear to say anything unpopular or illegal, lest they be reported to the authorities as being “anti-government”, or just plain “insane.” Your blog is neither cynical nor humorous, but an attempt to differentiate between "correct " and "incorrect" thinking . Your tactics instill an implicit fear that "incorrect thinkers" will be labeled a “fruit cake”, thus chilling people into simply saying nothing. You accuse those of us that are opposed to using weapons of mass destruction on an important and interactive natural satellite as being "fruitcakes" or "lunatics". You can call it a “probe”, or a “kinetic energy device”, or whatever euphemism you like, but I believe most people would agree that creating a five mile crater while awaiting a 6-12 mile plume off the lunar surface is a WMD. Most people who expressed concerns asked the fundamental question, “by what authority does the United States imagine it can unilaterally use such measures against a target that is shared by the entire world? “ Does that make them a "fruitcake"? The major media release only hours before this act contributed to the legitimate concern and anger of many citizens here and abroad without a chance for discussion. The effect? Once again, we display to the rest of our planet the “in your face” policy of doing whatever and whenever we want, regardless of the wishes of others. I believe it would be a mistake to bank on the political or social apathy you and people like you think exists in this country. Perhaps there are those that even congratulate your effort to ridicule “the long gaggle of “fruitcakes” opposed to this destructive act. History, however, has demonstrated that what you have actually done has effectively radicalized that segment of the population that may well have “non-normative” beliefs about “bombing the moon”. You have also converted some who “previously sat on the fence “and are now more fearful of their government and will now be more vigilant of NASA projects. Moreover, your ridicule may translate to those environmentally conscious, or perhaps those who have religious beliefs such as those of Native Americans, that they are also “fruitcakes”, but then, that is the consequence of ignorance.
Get your facts straight and maybe you wouldn't be freaked out by such an event. They are not creating a 5 mile crater, the energy needed to do that would be enormous. They are crashing the spent stage into an existing crater. That will create something like a 20 meter crater within a crater. This occurs naturally all the time, the moon is constantly hit by various objects going at much higher velocity than this piddly thing that NASA is crashing into the moon.
Have any of them looked at the moon? It's covered in craters, the craters have craters. You can see them from earth without a telescope. It's been hit a million times by stuff WAY bigger then the tin can NASA dropped on it.
But maybe there is a plan here by the PTB... Divert all the morons from noticing that there are real problems (could also explain fox news) that people should be looking at.
Muppet.
You clearly failed science at a very young age didn't you? This device will generate an energy impact of about 1.5 tonnes of TNT. Certainly nothing that qualifies as a WMD. The small nukes used in WW2 were about 20 kilotons - so in excess of 10000 times bigger than this. And they are classified as a small nuke. The expected crater will be 20 metres wide and 4 metres deep - not 5 miles across. The only reason you get a big plume is because of the combination of no atmosphere and low gravity.
The impactor was sent into the bottom of an existing crater, but that is about 10 times the size of crater you were talking about, so not sure where you got your fruitcake figures.
would rather rehearse primitive myths than do old-fashioned science. How else to explain astronomers' preoccupations with fast-moving little things crashing into slow-moving big things? Examples: Comet Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter. Deep Impact. And now this.
All are metaphors for a brave spunky little sperm bravely engaging a large fruity round egg - a metaphor from which countless other metaphors derive.
The search for scientific knowledge has mutated in the hyperreality of the postmodern era into the non-reflexive rehearsal of the "deep truths" alleged of the canons of art and literature. Ironic. It had it coming though.
"as a woman i feel violated that NASA feel it's acceptable to bomb the moon.
i demand this is stopped. i think we should get an INJUNCTION against NASA."
we'll as a man i feel unempowered that I'm prevented from blowing stuff, by preventing this you are oppressing my creative urges to rain chaos down and create afresh from the ashes of the old....
now go an make me a cup of tea... no sugar.
"by what authority does the United States imagine it can unilaterally use such measures against a target that is shared by the entire world?"
" The major media release only hours before this act contributed to the legitimate concern and anger of many"
You seem to believe that this was kept secret until hours before impact. The mission was planned years ago,and information about its objectives is easily found thanks to the Internet. NASA releases information constantly, but the mainstream media only reports the exciting bits.
Unilaterally? Has there been any worldwide political or scientific objections? No, none whatsoever.
Just a few fruitcakes jumping up and down at the last moment.
...was that it wasn't a scientific experiment, but a test of a space weapon. Perhaps they're worried that we need to be protected from aliens with space missile technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfsMZKwqw3w
These creatures are obviously xenophobic, given their reaction to the diplomatic faux pas (involving non-use of eating utensils) committed at 5:25 in this clip.
Alien, because I'm wondering what planet the nutjobs came from...
"Wouldn't it seem logical for the earth to have a reciprocal effect on the moon - but it doesn't"
Yes it does. The Earth's tidal forces hold the Moon's orientation so that one side always faces us (more or less), AND the interaction between the Earth, the Moon and the oceans actually _accelerates_ the Moon, causing it to _gain altitude_ and move away from us over time.
He's so bright and milky white
Shining down upon the ground
He's so bright, milky white
Shining down upon the ground
Everybody look at the moon
Everybody seeing the moon
The moon is bright, he's milky white
Everybody look at the moon
Hey! I did a song. Jupiter, I did a song. You ain't got one.
You can always tell who the nuts are, paragraphs people, paragraphs. Has anybody else ever noticed how people with nutty idea also think paragraphs are for "other" people?
See that gap Wolf207, that's paragraph space, once you master that simple concept people will read a lot more of what you write, I only went back to read it because of the other comments, I originally dismissed it as nuts. Well....I was correct, true, but at least I would have made the effort to read it sooner.
I commented to my wife about the fruitcakes who thought that this tiny probe would shatter the moon, and that, in turn, would impact us in some bizarre way, and she immediately said, "Well, yeah, they're crazy, but what if the moon did shatter? Wouldn't that mess up our tides?"
This is a woman who passed college-level physics with a B+, and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Biology (with a minor in Chemistry) who honestly believed that the gravitational pull of an aggregated mass would be different from a solid object. (So, she thought that if the moon were replaced by an equal mass of marbles, we'd be in trouble). So it's definitely not just the nut jobs who are misinformed -- it seems like the U.S. educational system isn't teaching gravity all that well.
(My father was a physicist, and his favorite exam question was, "What would happen to Earth's orbit if you replaced the sun by a black hole of equal mass?")
"Criticism and humor designed to ridicule and belittle people with honest fears or beliefs is a tactic often used by authoritarian regimes to create fear of disclosure ...."
That's bollocks. Authoritarian regimes arrest and imprison or kill those who spread views that the regimes consider subversive or otherwise unacceptable.
If people don't want to be ridiculed, they should not spout utter nonsense on the Internet. The Internet has become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, with people making up pseudo-science where they don't understand and/or cannot be bothered to find the facts. Such idiots should be exposed as such - that should encourage them to either shut up or acquanit themselves with the facts.
Firing this rocket stage into the moon where it is hitting at twice the speed of a bullet is probably going to result in wreckage similar to Del Boy's passion wagon (i.e. bent metal).
Would it REALLY have been so much more expensive to actually arrange for a lunar landing which resulted in a softer set-down where instrumentation could have survived the impact? I mean, not very long ago they managed to plonk a small satellite onto the surface of a piece of fast-moving space rock - the satellite had not been designed to land on anything and the space rock was not exactly stable in terms of landing site. And that poor ickle satellite got to the surface and then phoned home!
It doesn't seem so far-fetched to believe that they could have arranged for a softer landing and with some very basic tools and scientific instruments plus a radio they could easily have got decent data back.
Or we could have given Gordon Brown a space suit and a couple of air tanks plus an ice pick and he could have done the world a service at last.
God. DAMN. Dude. That is quite possibly the awesomest post on any comment thread anywhere on El Reg, at least up until the moment I'm typing this.
"Spunky little sperm!" "mutated in the hyperreality...!" Priceless.
Pint of lager icon, only because there's no pint of stout icon, which the above commenter richly deserves.
Re AC : "(So, she thought that if the moon were replaced by an equal mass of marbles, we'd be in trouble). So it's definitely not just the nut jobs who are misinformed"
Wouldn't be the first time theory hasn't turned out so well in practice; numerous Darwin Awards testify to that.
Of course, if those 'marbles' all held together and didn't drift apart to form our version of rings around Uranus, it may well not affect the tides or anything else.
"Told You So" T-shirts may well have been invented for partners of the arrogantly "informed".
By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 9th October 2009 16:52 GMT
The moon has no fault line as there is no tectonic activity, it just doesn't have the same crust structure we do. Any degeree level geologist can tell you that. It is simply inert rock unlike the earth, mercury, mars etc
Second, the moon is about the same age as Earth, so for at least 4.5 billion (ish) years it has been hit countless times (Hence the craters) people who think it might in some way be affected by something that is actually smaller and less powerful that most of the craters that hit it (Remember the probe hit inside a crater, that had to have been formed by a much larger and more powerful impact.) are a bit odd to say the least.
By Wolf207 Posted Friday 9th October 2009 17:00 GMT
The only reason you are geting a plume that large is the lack of an atmosphere and the lack of any sizable gravity field, allowing the relatively small impact to throw up such a dust cloud. It isn't because of the device being sent to hit the planet, that is such small fry it is like a light aircraft hitting the Earth, and we are not spinning out of orbit into the sun. Nothing we can hit the moon with is anything like as powerful as the meteors that have hit it in the past. Gravity is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, requirements just to get into space is staggering and nothing we can do today will push the moon or earth out of orbit.
People amaze me, they prattle on about some ancient dogma or religion against 21st century technology. But use 21st century technology to do it. I don't go against thier beliefs, but they can't use technology to complain against NASA. They should be using word of mouth and not to any journalist that will use the internet or TV or the mobile phone. That is just showing their hypocracy.
What is very clear with the mad people in the world, is that science whether, physics or geology is a sadly lacking education in some of the larger countries and allegedly more educated of this world.
wolf207- very well said. thank you.
anyone notice the general trend/ratio between the few voices of concern (real sanity), and the many voices of ridicule (smoke screening bullshit).? makes me wonder how many of those full of ridicule and lack of compassion are few pretending to be many.. or work for NASA and their minions.
i for one can not be ridiculed into silence. some may label, categorize and misconstrue me, but they are all mistaken because i am unique. and such people certainly don't know me at all.
I rather like the theory that the moon is a giant water balloon...
"Wouldn't it seem logical for the earth to have a reciprocal effect on the moon - but it doesn't"
Yeah it does. The Earth's gravitation field is what stops the moon drifing off into space. You wouldn't get tides even if there were oceans because the moon rotates with the same period as the Earth (what are the chances of that happening, BTW?) but gravity does have an effect.
"Why aren't core tests done before blasting it"
They were, during the original Apollo landings. Not frantically deep, granted, but samples were taken.
"blasting the moon could send it out of orbit "
We're hitting it with something that was launched from the Earth's surface, so it'll be a couple of tons at most. We'v e got a pretty good idea what the mass of the moon is - 7.36 × 10^22 KG , I assume by measuring the effect of the Earth and the Sun on it. It'll have as much effect on the orbit of the moon as a bug hitting the windscreen of a train does, possibly less.
"which would kill us"
Removing the moon would severely screw with things but I doubt it would kill us outright. Hitting something on the way out, Venus or the Sun say, would spoil your day though.
"There are members of the concerned general public who are not werewolves, pagans or anarcho-primitives?
"
Apparently not...
Alan.
'...i feel unempowered that I'm prevented from blowing stuff,...'
I feel you're a little of topic (as well as off website) there Spider. I've not read every comment but I'm pretty sure nobody's objected to you blowing anything. Blow away brother, blow away!
It's definitely Monday isn't it.
I think a big part of the problem is that all journalists often need to enliven their writing in order to make a report into a story (this is a given), and bad journalists overdo it. Hence "collision" becomes "blast" and elements of society who take the written word always as 100% gospel go mental.
NASA and everybody else is chasing a false promise, a dream. All the water on the moon was dumped when a long sharp meteor hit the north pole 6000 years ago. The water all spurted out and the Earth's gravity drew it inward. When it hit the atmosphere it caused massive thunder-storms and rain showers that lasted 40 days and 40 nights, flooding the entire world. When the rain stopped and nearly all the water evaporated, the sun blew it away, out toward the really big planets where it was sucked down. Jupiter sucked so hard that Saturn couldn't get its water down to it's surface and that's where Saturn's rings came from...
Just ask Noah.
Luther Blissett wonders "How else to explain astronomers' preoccupations with fast-moving little things crashing into slow-moving big things? "
Luther, look up the phrase "spectrum analysys" and ponder deeply why it might be interesting to take a look at anything ejected during a very energetic extraterrestrial impact.
AC queries: "Would it REALLY have been so much more expensive to actually arrange for a lunar landing which resulted in a softer set-down where instrumentation could have survived the impact?"
Yes. Consider: Fire a rifle at a target. Hit target with bullet. Observe results. --or-- Fire rifle at target. Have bullet slow down just before impact, and gently settle onto target. Have bullet "call home". Have bullet dig into target. Have bullet analyze material from target. Have bullet send data collected home. (It's more complicated than that, but I'll spare you. Rocket science isn't exactly difficult, but the complexity of the details aren't trivial.)
Sillyfellow: As usual, I don't know where to start. However, I strongly suggest you at least attempt to get an education, unless you enjoy having people laugh at your appalling ignorance.
JohnG: Well said, that man.
Quite rightly said jake.
I have been watching these moon bomb/blast/impact/oh-my-god threads. We should remember that the 'age of reason' is still so very young, perhaps 400 years at most. This is a tiny time in the life our our species (a really tiny time if you believe the world is 10,000, 6,000 or 4482 years old.
I am sure that reasoning ability has been with us much longer than that, however, reason has been shouted down (and still is, actually, reason is under serious threat, but I stae the obvious.). It occurred to me, how to start a religion? I know! See an implausible threat (like a moon splitting in half, blah, blah), test out your audience, seek reverence from said audience. Once the fear is in place, suggest there is a diety holding the power, and you can mediate on behalf of the feared.
Oh---by the way, I am not going to do any more hunting, you will have to feed me. Oh--by the way, I need one of the best huts around here, you will build it for me. Oh---by the way, I will have to ratify any/ANY decision the chief/king makes, be it war, wife or taxes (I am exempt of those of course).
We have had a lot of fun in this thread with the 'whacktards'. But, seriously, do these people hold the same genes that the founders of our religions also held? Does one not hear the same bleats? 'Do not be arrogant! etc.',
Acquisition of learning and execution of reason are not acts of arrogance. For this moon thing, as others had stated eloquently, there was no physics issue, no possible doomsday scenario. The gnat hitting your windscreen is a close approximation. For rights of NASA to 'bomb' the moon, see earlier posts that show this was planned and known for a very long time. For Noah, see Black Sea origins via the opening of the Dardenells in a sudden rush.
I am grateful to live in this time of reason, I grew up in it, it seems to be fading fast in the popular culture, which is a dire shame for the future. I am so happy that here, I see fellows, who hold the flag of objectivity, observation, experiment, result and conclusion still so high.
Remember folks, we are only 400 years old, my hopes for the future of mankind rest with reason surviving beyond all attacks and absurdities. It does not matter that I/we shall not witness the far future, but I hope we do not witness our deep dimise in our lifetimes.
Reason rules, 'cos it's reasonable innit :-)
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