Dear Clangers...
... DUCK!
NASA has confirmed it will crash its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) probe into the Moon's surface on April 21 after the successful completion of its missions. LADEE has been operating around the Moon since November, analyzing its scant atmosphere to solve one of the odder mysteries of our natural …
They're holding a contest to pick the day, hour and exact minute of impact. Thousands of punters may enter, covering all possible minutes. They plan to crash it on the back of the Moon, out of sight.
SO HOW CAN THEY DETERMINE THE EXACT MINUTE OF IMPACT?
Perhaps the LRO will be tasked to help pick a winner?
Oh please, please, can it "accidentally" hit the Chinese Jade Rabbit rover? It's not doing much, and its death "at the hands of the imperialist capitalist running dogs" would be much more valuable for the PR.
Or perhaps it can take out the old Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover. After it's destroyed, perhaps the current owner "Lord British" could get an insurance claim out of it.
... for a Man and Mankind
“We have beautiful data,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, principal investigator for the Lunar Dust Experiment, or LDEX, onboard LADEE. “We discovered that a cloud of dust permanently engulfs the Moon, and that the dust density dramatically increases toward its surface."Without an atmosphere to abate incoming meteorites, the Moon gets peppered with thousands of space pebbles each year, and a gram of material hitting at 14 miles per second throws up an enormous amount of dust, Horanyi explained.
Spot the permanent heavy dust clouds in this historic video ...... http://youtu.be/RMINSD7MmT4
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In view of its function, surely the unit of size should be Dysons rather than vending machines?
I await the cheap British version of 2010 in which alien intelligences use a huge array of self-replicating vacuum cleaners to gobble up all the Moon dust, to make it tidy before the lizard overlords set up their permanent base.
...yes, I do know vacuum cleaners don't function in, er, vacuum.
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What is completely insane is the amount of junk that is orbiting aounrd space. This is not just around earth but elsewhere. Every probe or explorer that get put up ends floating round for ever or left to decay on the surface. To deliberatly destroy something by running it into the surface is just stupid. It will contaminate a huge area with debris. The Moon and Mars are covered with man-made crap that we have left in the quest for knowledge. All this junk is left because it is considered too expensive to clean up.
It is just as bad, if not worse then lobbing barrels of radioactive waste and concrete into a trench in the Atlantic.
Man and science has an awful lot to answer for and is a stark reminder of how selfish mankind actually is.