So there’s this spacecraft in the vicinity of the moon today. It’s called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS for short. Tomorrow morning around 6:30 a.m. Central, LCROSS will crash into the moon — which has actually been the point of its mission all along.
The LCROSS mission is a search for water on the moon. The LCROSS mission is going to do this by sending a rocket crashing into the moon causing a big impact and creating a crater, throwing tons of debris and potentially water ice and vapor above the lunar surface. This impact will release materials from the lunar surface that will be analyzed for the presence of hydrated minerals which would tell researchers if water is there or not
Of course this mission didn’t really make it into widespread public knowledge until someone out there thought something like this:
Hey! Crashing something into the moon? We’re BOMBING the moon! Holy crap! Stop the presses! It’s horrible! How can we crash things into the friendly old moon? It might knock it off its orbit! Or shatter it into a hundred pieces! It’s the end of the world!
So yeah. It is always sad to be reminded of the general lack of basic science knowledge that exists in society today.
In the midst of the LCROSS craziness, President Obama hosted a star party on the White House lawn last night. 2009 is the World Year of Astronomy and this week is Space Week, so the event was intended to highlight Obama’s “commitment to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.”
It looked like a pretty cool event, and it’s nice to see Obama paying attention to science. And yet I must admit that it feels like lip service. We’re 9 months into his administration and NASA still has no better forward plan than we did a year ago. There are more important issues facing the country than NASA, to be sure. But without some direction on where we should go, NASA could flounder for years…
