Throwing Things At The Moon

The Moon is great isn’t it? It features in the best album ever (The Dark Side of the Moon)  and is like an old friend flying round the Earth. Other planets may have more Moons and more colourful Moons but our moon is ours.  If you feel that the Moon needs a hug and protection like a bullied friend then this petition may be to your liking.

China's Moon Rocket

We have to remember though that the moon is just a lump of rock or is it? Biologists speculate that tides, generated mostly by the Moon, would have been a logical place for life to originate. Sea creatures might have then used tidal regions as experimental sites for checking out the land, and therefore as an excuse to develop lungs. So it’s a very useful piece of rock!

If we removed the moon then its effect on our tides  and its effect on the motion and orbit of Earth would be felt. Whether we could live with this or not is unknown.  more of an explanation

To keep you all up to date here is a summary of the moon’s past and it’s predicted future by NASA and the Chinese Space Agency.

• The former Soviet Union’s Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to hit the lunar surface on September 12, 1959.
• Rangers hit the Moon between 1961 to 1965 to take close up pictures.
• July 1969: Neil Armstrong takes first human steps on the Moon
• Lunar Prospector impacted the Moon.
• China’s Chang’e I hit the Moon surface in March 2009 after completing its tasks.
• September 2010 NASA’s final space shuttle mission when the Discovery makes a farewell visit to the International Space Station, ending 29 years of shuttle flights
• launch of a lunar rover - the next stage of China’s three-stage moon mission – in 2012
• 2009 NASA’s LCROSS impacts the moon
• 2010-2015: Nasa has to rely on Russian spacecraft and possibly private carriers to transport crew and equipment to the space station (ISS)
• March 2015 NASA’s first manned launch of Orion and Constellation’s first mission to ISS
• In 2017 another Chinese lunar rover, which will land on the moon and return to Earth with lunar soil and stone samples for scientific research.
• A manned lunar Chinese landing is expected before 2020.
• 2024 NASA’s completion of the first permanent Moon base allowing astronauts to acclimatise to long-duration missions and prepare for multi-year journeys to Mars
• 2037 NASA’s target date for first astronauts to land on Mars, Sources: Nasa/Presidential Vision for Space Exploration

As you can see the Rangers were the first to hit the Mis hotoon, then lunar prospector, then Chang’e  and next it will be LCROSS (the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite).

LCROSS launch

LCROSS is a double spacecraft, a small, smart mothership and a big, not-so-smart rocket booster. The mothership is called the “Shepherding Spacecraft” because it shepherds the booster to the Moon. They’ll travel to the Moon together, but hit separately.

The booster strikes first, the blow transforming 2 tons of mass and 10 billion joules of kinetic energy into a blinding flash of heat and light. Researchers expect the impact to gouge a crater about 20 meters wide and throw up a plume of debris as high as 40 km.

Close behind, the Shepherding Spacecraft will photograph the impact and then fly right through the debris plume. Onboard spectrometers can analyze the sunlit plume for signs of water, water fragments, salts, clays, hydrated minerals and assorted organic molecules. I am sure that if there is anything useful there it will be found.

LCROSS will give more than 200 times the impact energy of Lunar Prospector, excavating a deeper crater and throwing debris higher where it can be plainly seen.

The predicted impact date is October 9 2009.

Based on lunar rocks brought back from the moon the Moon has been found to be volcanic in origin. The rocks are basalts, similar to the kind of volcanic rock found on Earth. The lunar basalts are rich in iron and magnesium, and they also contain glassy structures that show rapid cooling. Unfortunately they don’t contain water.

Will the Moon split in two on LCROSS’s  impact? Will the Moon lose its orbit and smash into the Earth? looking at the facts there is no danger to the Moon.  NASA has predicted that people may ask questions and have produced some frequently asked questions.

Conspiracy theories are rife for the Moon, the Moon landings especially. It is not surprising then that LCROSS has its following of contrived conspiracy theories. I suppose there will always be these sort of feelings about things that we can’t touch or see but then how do we trust our sight and touch anyway? But that is another story.

Is the Moon a gigantic starship? Asteroids have always been thought of as a resource that could be hollowed out so why not the Moon? It may have travelled thousands of light years to get here and now we are going to throw things at it. There may be a whole civilisation in stasis, frozen, waiting for the correct moment to wake up. Or, perhaps it all went wrong and they need some help, perhaps shaking them up with LCROSS will do the trick.

Conspiracy Theory

To go one step further the Moons crew may have inhabited the Earth. For a free Ebook on this jump here. if you want a laugh as well there is a really old book, our mysterious spaceship moon. I haven’t read it.

This blog has written stacks on NASA’s attack on a civilisation  hiding out on the Moon. LCROSS is said to be a kinetic missile specially designed to wipe out an alien base. I’ll leave it to you to make your own opinion about this but you might like to read this on the Apollo 11 transcripts.

LRO (lunar reconnaissance orbiter) was launched on the same rocket as LCROSS and is currently mapping the Moon in very fine detail.

So why is NASA going to so much trouble with the Moon? Well, as you can see from the time line at the top of this post NASA plans to build a moon base by 2024. If water and other useful materials are found this would be the perfect place for a base and to build spacecraft to travel deeper into the solar system for example Mars.

The Moon would also become profitable after a while especially if there are private companies flying there and requesting resources. The moon base could be the most expensive hotel around.

With all this though there comes the argument of ownership. Nobody should own the moon, but I can’t see NASA saying “take what you like” after all the effort and money they have put into it. The biggest rival would be China at the moment as everyone else is slightly further behind and also works together with NASA on the space station.

It is a real pity that China is run by a dictator and won’t even think of shaking hands with NASA.  A recent series I saw on Discovery and is regularly repeated was race to Mars. This is not a bad series and shows the race between the Allied nations and China to get to Mars. I have posted the first video and then for the others you should go to this youtube playlist.

the moon it seems is a very convenient staging post with its low gravity and hopefully water and materials. It’s there, we might as well use it and any green men should have spoken up and told Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to clear off if they didn’t want us around.

http://www.sonyclassics.com/moon/

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