Comments on: Lunar smackdown!

By: Image of future LCROSS lunar impact site | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:49:18 +0000

[...] SMART-1, an ambitious ESA spacecraft that orbited the Moon for nearly two years. Its ultimate fate? It too impacted the lunar surface in September 2006. While that impact wasn’t meant to hunt for water, it did kick up some [...]

By: Andy Varga

Andy Varga — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:30:10 +0000

I agree that locations of lunar landings would be of historic interest and valued by future inhabitants (much as we cherish our Tall Ships etc). But a literal lump of metal from a high speed impact would have less value than a meteor. A meteor at least represents a foriegn (extra terestial) body and may hold something to be learned. SMART-1’s debri would hold no such “yet to be descovered” information.

By: Troy

Troy — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 22:25:53 +0000

Regarding the issue of the moon being a junk yard. Any items from the 20 and 21st centuries that are found by future denizens of the moon would be priceless collector’s items. Considering the prohibitive cost of sending things to the moon it is unlikely to happen soon. A real issue for me though would be if some company/person/goverment decided to use the moon as a giant bill board. Debris or artifacts visible from earth would also be an issue.

By: Irishman

Irishman — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:48:27 +0000

CafeenMan said:
>Why is it that hubble can show us full-color galaxies gazillions of light years away and when something happens on the moon itâ€™s a boring pixelated white spot?

It’s a combination of size of the object, distance away, and resolution of the camera. There are some discussions around here somewhere discussing the resolution of Hubble on the moon, and IIRC it’s about 30 meters or so. That means the smallest items that show up as pixels are the size of a house. Those stunning “details” we see in images from light years away are HUGE.

>Come to think of it, why do we know the composition of entities gazillions of miles away but we donâ€™t know whatâ€™s in our own soil?

Again, to what resolution are you trying to know? We know what stars are made of because they are burning, and burning produces light, and the characteristics of the light can identify the materials. But the level of detail is limited. We can analyze soil samples in numerous ways to find all sorts of things that we can’t study about stars. But without the tests, we can’t know what’s in our soil.

By: M

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:52:09 +0000

I know exactly what some conspiracy theorists will have to say about this experiment.

[stupid]MOON ANTS! Look, you can see them right there in the picture it’s PROOF! What are you, brainwashed? Obviously now they’ll be angry that we dropped a satellite onto their colony and life will turn into Starship Troopers – the movie, not the book![/stupid]

By: NelC

NelC — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:19:39 +0000

Andy, at a couple of klicks per second impact velocity, I doubt that there’s enough left of SMART-1 to distinguish it from the rest of the rubble. And it’s not as though the crater it leaves behind is going to be noticeable, you know, amongst all the other craters.

If you want to go and clear it up, though, you go ahead and do it. Try to not leave too many boot-prints.

By: NelC

NelC — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:13:10 +0000

“As a matter of fact, it’s all dark.” I take that as a lead-in to the fact that the Moon — despite the impression our eyes give us at night — has a very low albedo, around 0.1. [Edit: Which in fact is what Phil says in his book, now that I go look.]

Otherwise, you can take the phrase “dark side of the Moon” just to mean the nightside, wherever that happens to be at any particular time, so it’s still usable as a rhetorical flourish, just not so useful as an indication of location.