Are people serious? I’ve been following LRO/LCROSS for nearly a year now. Sadly, it seems people only know LCROSS as an attempt at bombing the Moon. This is thanks to the media who presumably do a poor job at explaining what this particular mission entails. My wife told me there were actual protests to LCROSS. I really don’t understand the big deal. So, in the next few paragraphs I’ll try to explain what LCROSS actually means.
I’m going to use lots of laymans terms. First of all I’m not a scientist, but I have enough understanding to know that LCROSS is in no way a “bomb”. There was no detonation. There was nothing to detonate. Having a detonation would have contradicted the mission objective. I will explain.
LRO/LCROSS launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on June 18, 2009. I watched the launch, good stuff. LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) is notable here because it has taken some incredible imagery of the Moon. LCROSS stands for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. I don’t see anything referring to a bomb in that name. Well, if it isn’t a bomb then what is it? LCROSS is made up of two parts. There is the shepharding spacecraft and then there is the impacter.
The shephard craft is what will take measurements of everything that the impacter kicks up. It is actually the LCROSS part. The other part is a spent rocket stage. This is important! The stage is spent. It was filled with liquid propellant at one point, the majority of which is used in getting the vehicle into space. The remaining propellants had to be gotten rid of. How? Simply by slowly spinning the space craft around it’s center of gravity. This helped to push all remaining propellants to one end so that they could be purged.
So, no, it wasn’t a bomb. There was actually a point where the vehicle WAS a bomb. That’s when it was sitting on the pad, fully fueled. By the time it reached the Moon, it was nothing more than a 4000 lb. hunk of metal.
Bombing the Moon is out of line and downright wrong. A better analogy would be that we’re “shooting the moon”. The spent stage was traveling a little over 5,000mph when it impacted. That’s a little over 1 mile a second or somewhere around 6000ft/sec. Now, with that said, 2 tons of metal traveling at that velocity is going to make quite a dent on the surface. I can almost certainly say that there is nothing left of the Centaur stage. At the velocity it impacted it’d almost certainly be vaporized! The key difference is that we’re using energy used to reach orbit nearly 4 months ago – not a weapon or a detonation of any type.
The plume of debris kicked up by the impact is what LCROSS was designed to study. Is there water in this debris? That was the burning question. I believe the data is still being looked over. This is also why the stage had to be as clean as possible. They didn’t want contaminants in the debris cloud.
So, to recap, again. This was not a bomb. It wasn’t a bomb. No weapons were used. No madmen could get their hands on this. This isn’t a huge conspiracy to test out space warfare. If you still believe that, then just go back to watching Scyfy, or whatever it’s called now. If you wish to know why we want to smack the Moon in the first place, keep reading.
Water, water everywhere and wait, where again? Water, is there. But we need to know exactly. Why? Money.
Lets just load up a bunch of Dasani and go! Launching rockets is not cheap. Cost per pound is in the thousands of dollars. Think about how much a gallon of water weighs. Add a crew and how many gallons they need just for consumption. Oh, now the “cha-ching” sound is starting to rack up. Solution? Use what is there.
Problem: you must know where it is. If you land 30 miles from the nearest extractable water source, then you might as well have landed 1000 miles away. Future space exploration depends on our ability to use resources available at the destinations we reach.
To conclude, I just want to say I watched this event live. The impact was so uneventful that I was shocked. When the impact was announced, I frantically scanned the television for any sign of anything. There was nothing visible. That’s the point. This impact was nothing but a microscopic pin prick to test for water. Look at the Moon as a whole. It’s gotten the crap beat out of it. Guess what? We didn’t do that. Space is dangerous! It’s a shooting gallery. What we did with LCROSS probably felt like more of a tiny tickle compared to what the Moon has endured.
I can understand people just not knowing what is going on. I just get irritated with the people we look to for news get it wrong as well. In their defense, if you see half of a news report, it’s easy to misread context and draw the wrong conclusions. How unscientific!
Here is my final point. Do the research yourself. If you feared the Moon was in danger, you simply needed to Google LCROSS or lunar impacter and a torrent of information would have been available. That information would (should) have put your fears to rest. Still, some people just want to get their 15 minutes…