..to see their plans for world domination have finally come to fruition! People of Earth (and Fukuoka City) will quail at mention of the the name LCROSS! And, of course, ACROSS!

Today's experiment.... worked!

It's a structure normally used to attach the payload and some electronics to the Atlas. Since it had to be there for LRO, they just packed it with a couple more electronics boxes, and viola! you have an impactor mission.

It was done on the cheap (for NASA) with lots of potential science return.

....THUD !

Osama bin Laden venerates the inventor of the round-about.

So why should space be any different?

If you want to see what something is made of, grab the biggest hammer you can find and hit it... hard!

Works for small things (only the hammer is another small thing, done in a big thing - particle accellerators) so why not the moon? Crash something into it and see what happens.

Maybe my boss will let me do the same with the old P3 I am forced to use to access one specific network...

I just wanted the little alien icon :-)

But then the sky will fall!

*Runs around screaming: THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!*

Is that it?

I was expecting something exciting!

wont be amused

/coat

new lunar probe

I sure wouldn't want my moon probed by a "heavy impactor"

Yeah, I know she knows all about it.....

It's the USAF trying to knock out the Lizardman Moonbase. The delay until October is because they haven't located it yet...

AC wrote:

>LCROSS is actually a neat implementation

I have a question. Won't the upper stage and so forth be full of hydrocarbons and stuff? Slamming it into the lunar surface will vaporise a proportion of the impactor, and potentially contaminate the plume, surely?

> viola! you have an impactor mission.

Shit! They're throwing musical instruments at the moon? Look out for the spectoscopic signature of that Stradivarius varnish...

No further comment required.

"Won't the upper stage and so forth be full of hydrocarbons and stuff? Slamming it into the lunar surface will vaporise a proportion of the impactor, and potentially contaminate the plume, surely?"

No. The Centaur stage is fuelled by liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen and are in a fairly slow orbit specifically to allow time for the tanks to vent. With direct sunlight raising the stage surface temp several 100 degrees and the very low pressure in space pretty much anything volatile will "boil" off.

With a detailed parts list and a fairly low mass relative to what they hope to eject into space it should be *fairly* easy to subtract out the part of the plume supplied by the stage.