Results tagged “Moon”

This Friday (starting at 22:31 Melbourne daylight savings time, 11:31 UTC), a Centaur booster rocket will crash on the surface of the Moon, closely followed by the spacecraft it helped get there, LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite). This is expected to be a spectacular event that will create a plume of debris several kilometres high -- and was carefully planned.

The intention of this phase of the LCROSS mission is to look for water near the southern lunar pole, testing the hypothesis that water ice exists at the permanently dark bottom of polar craters. In order to do that, the booster rocket that carried LCROSS (and its cousin LRO) up to the Moon will be made to crash into the crater Cabeus. The resulting plume of debris will then be studied by hundreds of Earth-based observatories, the lunar orbiter LRO, the Hubble Space Telescope... and the LCROSS craft itself, which will fly through the plume, analysing its composition directly. It will then crash on the same crater, four minutes after the booster, generating another (smaller) plume which will be similarly studied from a distance.

One interesting thing to be aware of: the debris plume should be easily seen from the Earth with any moderately-sized telescope (minimum aperture of 10 to 12 inches) as it is illuminated by the Sun (the actual impact won't be visible as it will be hidden by the crater walls). Of course, for this you will need to be on the side of the Earth facing the Moon -- and this does not include Australia. The best place to be is the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in fact, but the west coast of the USA is well located as well (the east coast, as most of South America, will have the Moon on the sky but will also have the Sun).

For Melbourne, the Moon will rise at 1:07am the next day, at which time nothing should be visible (the plume will have long since fallen back onto the surface). The best way to watch the impact, then, will be through NASA TV. NASA has put together an excellent LCROSS viewer's guide which will tell you where to go (and, if you happen to be in one of the right locations, where to look at and how).

More information (much more, in fact) can be found at the main LCROSS mission page.

...Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were inside the Apollo 11 spacecraft, on their way to the Moon. They would reach their destination on 21 July at 6:17:40 AEST (20 July 20:17:40 UTC), and Neil Armstrong would become the first human to set foot on the Moon a few hours later, at 12:56 AEST. Images of this event were sent to the whole world from tracking stations in eastern Australia, as anyone who's watched "The Dish" knows.

There is really not much I can write about this event that hasn't been written before and better by other writers, so I will simply let this post mark the occasion. Or, rather, I will let the image below mark the occasion.

That is the Apollo 11 landing site, as photographed last week by the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, current on its mission orbiting our satellite. You can clearly see the Eagle landing module, and if you click on the image you'll be taken to the NASA article with images of the landing sites of the other Apollo missions. And the best thing is: better images will come. These pictures were taken before the LRO reached its final orbit, and future passes over these sites will yield much better resolution.

So, let's celebrate the past with an eye on the future. Here's to our return to the Moon!

On 18 May 1969, Apollo 10 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the last mission in preparation for the Moon landing mission that was to come three months later.

Apollo 10 was a full "dress rehearsal", the only one in the Apollo program. The ship was identical to the one used for Apollo 11, and everything progressed — on board and on land — just as if a landing was going to happen. The Lunar Module was deployed on 23 May with Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene A. Cernan on board, leaving John W. Young alone in the command module, and it descended towards the Moon, spending six hours away from the Command Module and getting as close as 15.7km from the surface before going back up and docking.

The mission landed safely on 26 May on the Pacific Ocean, some 500km east of the American Samoa islands, and after that NASA was ready for the "real deal" with Apollo 11.

Commander Thomas Stafford left NASA soon after (ostensibly due to not having been selected to fly Apollo 13) and never returned to space; Young landed on the Moon with Apollo 16 in 1972 and flew the Space Shuttle's inaugural mission in 1981, among other missions; and Cernan has the distinction of being so far the last person to have been on the surface of the Moon, as a crew member on Apollo 17.

Most people won't notice it, but we will have a lunar eclipse tonight, visible from anywhere in Australia (weather permitting, of course) — and also from New Zealand, most of the Pacific, Alaska, China, parts of India and most of Russia. The continental US sees only part of the eclipse, with the Moon setting before it ends.

A penumbral eclipse happens when the Moon goes through the penumbra of the Earth, the area of "partial shadow" around the main shadow of the planet. Viewed from the Moon, this appears as a partial solar eclipse (an umbral eclipse is seen from the Moon as a total solar eclipse).

In eastern Australia, the eclipse starts at 23:36 AEST AEDT (12:36 UTC), with the maximum eclipse at 01:38 tomorrow morning (14:38 UTC). Visually, you will see one "corner" of the full Moon clearly darker that the rest of the disk. More information and a visibility diagram can be seen at the HMNAO eclipse's website.