Massive EXPLOSION visible to naked eye SEEN ON MOON Sensational news today from the Moon, as skywatchers say a huge explosion - as bright as a star, and visible from Earth with the naked eye - has been seen on the lunar surface. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," splutters Bill Cooke, a top NASA boffin. According to NASA, …
Mmmmmm NASA maffs and sients.
"NASA calculations indicate that a meteoroid probably around 0.4 metres across and massing 40kg-odd barrelled into the lunar regolith going at around 56 thousand mph."
Yes sirrreeee - that was a Oh - dot - oh - four all rightey.... same as a 50 cal, only rounder.
56 thousand miles per hour? x 1.6 = ~90,000Kmh or 24Km a second....
Damn was that hard? No not really. I am not from NASA.
My main 2c worth is that if the average speed of meteors are coming in at about 5 Km a second, and this one is about 5 x as fast....
What are we going to do with the ones that come in at us at that speed... or fastera?
And the biggerestust ones too....
Ommmmmm ohh ahhh....
As the bomb said to the crew, "I think. Therefore I am. Let there be light."
This is the image I came across ages ago... but that one had the caption, "Houston? What the fu......?"
http://image2.xitek.com/forum/pics/201212/18680/1868002/1868002_1354588149.jpg
Sgt Pinback: "Alright bomb, prepare to receive new orders."
Bomb 20: "You are false data"
Sgt Pinback: "Hmmmm?"
Bomb 20: "Therefore I shall ignore you."
Sgt Pinback: "Hello bomb?"
Bomb 20: "False data can act only as a distraction, therefore I shall refuse to perceive you."
Sgt Pinback: "Hey, bomb!"
Bomb 20: "The only thing that exists is myself."
Sgt Pinback: "Snap out of it, bomb."
Bomb 20: "In the beginning, there was darkness and the darkness was without form, and void.
Sgt Pinback: "What the hell are you talking about?"
Bomb 20: "And in addition to the darkness there was also me, and I moved upon the face of the darkness, and I saw that I was alone."
Sgt Pinback: "Hey....bomb?"
Bomb 20: "Let there be light"
I recommend that we surround the entire planet with several miles of protective gas which will convert the meteor's energy into heat and dissipate it safely.
We should also arrange that large areas of land in big countries along an east-west axis are mostly uninhabited or filled with people we don't really care about.
what budget?
oh the meagre budget that pales next to defence spending which they use to PUT ROBOTS ON ANOTHER PLANET? I have an idea, they could have custom made NASA staplers and other random pointless shit not necessary for being fucking awesome.
Although it could be that green screen and type-writer animation has been so engrained in the public conciousness as the look of spaaaace that they now perpetuate that because it simply looks right to them.
If they still do the job why change? I did a stink at a county council in the 90's (some networking mostly) and their data suite still had reel to reel tape drives (sat by a wolfcreek, I guess for now and then value), kilostreams and various piles of dust with aging servers under them, it looked like it was straight from buck rodgers. They worked so nobody changed them.
Often because a change of hardware meant new software and most of it was bespoke. I learnt a lot about sane budgeting from the last place I ever expected to find it. It cost considerably less to keep a few coders well versed in cobol etc then it did to build a new system which would in all likeliness overrun, be over budget and break frequently.
[According to NASA, the mighty blast briefly "glowed like a 4th magnitude star ... the explosion packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT". For comparison that's twice as much explosive as one would find in a US Air Force nuclear-bunker-busting MOP superbomb]
Or, alternatively, a bit less explosive power than a 1945 British "Grand Slam" bomb (6.5 tons TNT equivalent).
Cf: The 1944 "Tallboy" bomb - 3.5 tons TNT equivalent; and the 1943 "Upkeep" bouncing bomb - 4.4 tons TNT equivalent. All of which were carried by modified Avro Lancaster bombers. A Grand Slam weighed 10 tons - Normal Lancasters could carry 6-7 tons of bombs. This compares to the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress which could only carry about 2 tons of bombs over a similar range. The later Boeing B-29 Superfortress with a crew of 10 could carry ~9 tons.
An interesting paper exercise after WWII compared the performance of these heavy bombers with the 2 crew, smaller, wood/composite construction de Havilland Mosquito which could carry nearly 2 tons of bombs at a speed about 1.5 times faster than a Lancaster (The Lancaster had a normal crew of 7).
As a 20-year -old during WW2, Freeman Dyson worked at Bomber Command performing statistical analysis of the results of bomber raids. He and a colleague recommended removing the gun turrets, which were largely ineffective at shooting down enemy fighters. This would have allowed Lancasters to fly 50 mph faster and reduced casualties simply because there would be fewer crew in each bomber. He commented:
All our advice to the commander in chief [went] through the chief of our section, who was a career civil servant. His guiding principle was to tell the commander in chief things that the commander in chief liked to hear… To push the idea of ripping out gun turrets, against the official mythology of the gallant gunner defending his crew mates…was not the kind of suggestion the commander in chief liked to hear.
"The Children's Crusade" in Disturbing the Universe, 1979
On the other hand, some of Harris's and his staff's prejudices may have had a grounding in the psychology of the crew and other issues.
British Commonwealth aircrew trained together en masse and generally formed themselves into cohesive and supportive crews that could work together before becoming operational.
The tail end Charlie was a useful lookout if not a potent aggressive defence. If they got wind of a fighter, then the pilot could push the bomber into a corkscrew which it could pull better than the German fighter.
Thirdly some projects were considered more effort than they were worth. A number of British bomber designs which would have been more effective than the Lancaster and Halifax were shelved because they wouldn't be ready before the end of the war. ( Vickers, Bristol and Avro were coming up with designs of around 100 tons all up carrying 25 tons of bombs and with 20mm cannon in turrets for defence).
according to Buttler "British Secret Projects: Fighters and Bombers 1935-1950"
@Darryl
We don't need to get a Lancaster on the moon - As any fule kno - Picture Link
Although getting the bomb there might be a problem...
Linguine?
I'm just dissapointed to not see NASA using proper size measurements, I mean, this is 100th of the size of a small family car or maybe the size of a domestic cat and it was travelling 1000 times faster than a chaved up Vauxhall Nova.
THATS science NASA!
BTW, I was massively dissapointed with "huge explosion", 5 tons of TNT is pretty small and the video was truly meh
The odds of a direct hit are perhaps not very high, and they'd probably build a moon base where very few impacts have happened, etc., but I agree that I would not relish the prospect of steeling my nerve even against a low probability.
Also, when the narrator said that the middle of March would be a good time to stay inside, I think mention should have been made of the specification of the bunker that can stand a direct hit like this: "inside" doesn't really cover it.
It's a little sad that that is the best video they have of it, I mean really NASA, that is the same quality I would expect from a $99 telescope with a 3 megapixel phone held up to it. If we can spot exo-planets 83 bazillion miles away, then why don't we have a better resolution of something already visible to the naked eye in the night sky?
I know that, I've seen the incredibly boring printouts that let us infer the existence of one of the exo-planets.
It wasn't a comment on NASA, but more of a jab, and as the other comment posted, a display of my snarkiness directed at our lack of funding to the sciences in general.
I firmly believe that our best time as a nation was after Kennedy issued the Moon challenge and every school in the country started pushing science and math education is a way never seen before, but all the changed around Regan's time. Now we have to sue schools just to keep them from trying to force kids to pray, or just to keep Creationism out of science class. Kids don't even do dissections in high school anymore, hell chemistry class nowadays has been relegated to a bottle of diet coke and some Mentos tabs, the Bunsen burners have long ago been removed.
Boy, we sure take these earth destroying bits of rock in stride. Like nothing bad will ever happen such as what happened 10k years ago that ended the Younger Dryas warming period, began another mini ice age and, oh, by the way, wiped out nearly all life in North America. Kinda makes global warming look like a Popsicle stick boomerang by comparison. Maybe that's the problem. Yep, that global warming will be the death of us as we refuse to shift our global threat perception of the GW circus and onto something that actually deserves the serious attention of all nations on this planet.
I fail your fail.
Younger Dryas was a cold period, not warm. The impact theory is for the start of the period, not the end. The impact would have been 12,800 years ago, not 10,000 years ago. And most people don't even think it was caused by an impact: the current best theory is that the cold period was caused by disruption of the Gulf Stream.
Right after the narrator says NASA recorded it on video they show a supposed vid of a impact on the lower right hand side of the moon then later in the vid point out the actual impact was in the upper left hand side. I don't think they showed the actual video of the actual impact but left us to assume they did. I hope some amateur astronomers got a vid of the impact.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
