Talk:LCROSS

False Statement?

"It was successful in discovering water in the southern lunar crater Cabeus."

It was only successful in discovering evidence that water was once there and now it is absent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.237.94.67 (talk) 03:13, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

"Extremely low quantities of water have been found", wouldn´t that statment be more correct? - ArminKow (talk) 21:25, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Impact size

How big will the crater be?

Criticism

Please don't blank the criticism section, it has appropriate references. Just because you don't agree with something doesn't mean it isn't there. For what it's worth, I think the criticism out there is a load of old tosh, but it is relevant *to the article* Violentbob (talk) 07:33, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Bob, are you really intending for your edit to stay in the page? Here is what you added:

Criticism

As of September 2009 the mission has become the subject of criticism by sections of the internet community , such as various Facebook groups. Typical criticism includes{{cite web | url = http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=228700285252 | title = NWO and NASA need to stop attacking our moon! | accessdate=2009-09-21 | publisher = Facebook }}</ref><ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=156630950405 | title = SAVE the MOON!!!!! | accessdate=2009-09-21 | publisher = Facebook }}

• vandalism of the Moon
• some unknown ulterior motive
• will have an unknown effect on the Earth
• will hurt the Moon goddess

Nasa-verve (talk) 15:24, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Lol criticisms are ridiculous and most are simply opinions on web posts, no different from my comment right now. I mean look at that, "hurt the Moon goddess," what kind of nonsense are you putting on this page. - Kev098 November 19, 2009 —Preceding undated comment added 18:34, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

Speed

has anyone else realized that the spacecraft is going to be traveling at OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.156.240.33 (talk) 02:47, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Yep, kilometers per hour, and we get it. Ruodyssey (talk) 05:54, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Craters

Will either of the impact craters be named? Or will they not be named because they are already part of a larger crater or whatever? If they are likely to be named is there some standard convention and if not has there been any public discussion of what they will be named or how a name will be chosen? Nil Einne (talk) 09:52, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I would conjecture that the craters will not be named, due to the Centaur impact vehicle and Shepherding spacecraft creating impact craters only 20 and 14 meters in diameter respectively. (source: http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av020/090610lcross.html) 136.159.131.180 (talk)

Time??

Impact occurred at the lunar South Pole on October 9, 2009, at approximately 9:35PM GMT.

This hasn't actually happened yet, it's only 1PM GMT, October 9th 2009 as I type this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Halinator9000 (talk • contribs) 12:04, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

The time really is confusing, 11:30 UTC it shows now.

NASA says 4:30 PDT thats -8, so +8 is 12:30 UTC. (or 13:30 for us brits in current BST) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.110.240.254 (talk) 13:58, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

No, PDT is UTC-7 (UTC-8 with a Daylight saving time +1 in effect at present during Northern Hemisphere Summer). Please see UTC-7#Pacific_Daylight_Time for details. Brits who use UTC in Winter and BST in Summer would be correct in thinking of this as (our local time -8) or (8 hours West of us) for the vast majority of the year.   — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 14:25, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Did anyone see anything?

LCROSS has now impacted. I've been watching the news and they show the moon getting closer but no impact cloud. Has anyone seen anything or did it fail? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.83.139.177 (talk) 12:48, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Press conference shows images of impact flash and the crater as well. Should be online soon. Planetary (talk) 14:36, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

You didn't see it? The feed I was watching showed a tiny spaceship emerging from the crater, hotly pursued by a giant worm-like creature. -- Scjessey (talk) 14:51, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

It happened, but considering that the moon is 379,000 kilometres (235,000 mi) from earth (the plume was about 20 kilometres (12 mi) high) and moon rock is gray (space is black), we didn't get a very good look. Hopefully we don't start bottling the moon's water, though; then, when we find out that the Moon is a living creature, we will be powerless as it begins to drink us instead. Master of Puppets - _{Call me MoP! :D} 15:20, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Images and spectra of plume and crater released. Someone post them please. Planetary (talk) 00:12, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I wish I had seen something!! Excellent top-secret imagery here but may perhaps fail on 100% verifiability ... Best wishes DBaK (talk) 07:51, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

High-Five Incident and Controversy

I don't think the controversy part should be in the article, as we don't have verifiable references from reliable sources that have called it controversial yet, just one editor appearing to do original research. I am waffling on the inclusion of the High-Five Incident, and would appreciate a discussion to form consensus about its inclusion.   — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 13:12, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Amusing but NN, leave it out. Cheers ^Khukri 13:15, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I see your point. The alleged CNN reference http://www.cnn.com/news/story/0,12223,45.html is "PAGE NOT FOUND". I am quoting the (admittedly funny but not currently notable) original addition here for ease of reference:

Shortly after the LCROSS spacecraft impacted the lunar surface mission control surveillance footage showed a NASA scientist getting totally dissed after extending his hand to another scientist in order to initiate a [[high five]].<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP64qqd88UI</ref> Preliminary reports suggest that the dissed scientist was "totally left hanging" and that the other party to the incident is "a douchebag".<ref>http://www.cnn.com/news/story/0,12223,45.html</ref>

  — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 13:47, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

It's funny, but lacking reliable sourcing, leave it out. cmadler (talk) 13:58, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Definitely include, Google is your friend, there is reliable sourcing: —— Scientific American picked it up, this adds up with a respectable monthly and online magazine plus some geeks in space (NASA), and a Youtube —— this surely is an opportunity to add some epic fail levity to an otherwise dry topic, or are you waiting for the blessing of SNL skit?

<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=lcross-strikes-earths-moon-as-other-2009-10-09 |date=9 Oct 2009 |title=LCROSS strikes Earth's moon as other moons continue to puzzle: Fourth dispatch from the annual planets meeting |first=George |last=Musser |publisher=[[Scientific American]] |quote=Shortly before the spacecraft itself hit, word came through that the infrared camera had indeed seen a thermal signature of the booster's crater. This comment was barely audible, though, over the bemused laughter as images of the mission control center showed one controller conspicuously failing to respond to another's high five }}</ref>

WurmWoode^T 04:37, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Outdent ... Fine, but I don't think it was right that the quote was in bold (surely not in MoS?), or that it had had links inserted that were not part of the original material quoted. Adding our own links seems to be then a question of interpretation or synthesis or whatever, adding a meaning that was no necessarily there in the quoted material. But I do agree we should mention this, since it is being discussed so widely. Best wishes DBaK (talk) 11:10, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Shepherding or LCROSS

For clarity, please decide if you will refer to the spacecraft as Shepherding or LCROSS. Thank you. BatteryIncluded (talk) 17:01, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Outer Space Treaty

Just curious, couldn't this test be considered a violation of the Outer Space Treaty? Specifically the parts that read:

• States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;
• the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes; JACOPLANE • 2009-10-9 17:30

LCROSS had no explosives, leftover propelent, warhead or other bomb payload. It was literally a hollow rocket stage and an impactor, both with sensors and at least one with cameras. It was purely a scientific mission, with no claim of ownership made (territoriality, turf) by impacting there and no threat to other nation's spacecraft or space relics (past or present) in orbit or on the moon. - Ageekgal (talk) 17:40, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Not to mention that if the payload had been dropped to Earth it would have entirely disintegrated during its approach. - Murphly (talk) 9 October 2009

Public reaction

Several commentators indicated disappointment that the impact did not result in the complete destruction of the moon, as they were under the impression that this was the whole point of the exercise.

Really? Without a citation, I am removing this; if someone actually has evidence for this, feel free to put it back. — crism (talk) 18:46, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Someone beat me to it. Never mind. — crism (talk) 18:47, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

While I wouldn't be surprised if that was true, I agree with removal. If it ain't sourced, remove it. Master of Puppets - _{Call me MoP! :D} 19:03, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I dislike the section "Results", as the project has collected data and produced results that are not limited to the impact. BatteryIncluded (talk) 03:11, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Apparently there are "Lunadarity" groups now emerging to protest the so-called "bombing" of the bomb and demand that NASA stop. It is great to see so much interest in astronomy all of a sudden. By way of encouragement for such groups, while putting their exercise in perspective, I have written a few paragraphs about the phenomenon. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 06:39, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Will add nasa video

im going to upload the nasa video. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.142.130.42 (talk) 00:07, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Redundant citations

References 4 and 9 refer to exactly the same article. They should be consolidated, but I don't know offhand the wiki syntax to make a reference tag point to a previous entry in the references list (and I don't have time now to figure it out).
71.242.6.231 (talk) 17:58, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I've taken care of it by using the name parameter of the <ref> tag to assign the duplicate reference links the same name identifier. See WP:NAMEDREFS for more information. --Itsfullofstars (talk) 00:06, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Numbers, and English/Metric

I noticed that the mass/weight values in the intro seemed to suffer from inflated precision in the conversion. Then I saw that they differed from the values in the infobox.

I find that the dual units (repeating the measurement in parens) gets very tedious in one paragraph in particular. Perhaps this would be better stated as a table or list?

And it seems to overstate the precision. 20m is a very broad number, implying a very loose estimate, while 66ft is much more precise. Doesn't wikipedia have some way of automating conversions yet, with a template? Any idea where such policy is being discussed in general?

—Długosz (talk) 20:42, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi, Długosz. The most common method for conversions that I'm aware of is template:convert. After reading your comment above, I've added {{convert|...}} to the article in a few places were it was useful. I also changed a few existing conversions so that meter/metre and kilometer/kilometre are simply abbreviated m and km, respectively, averting any edit wars over spelling in the process. :-)

As far as your remark about overstating precision, it's worth noting the convert template also ended up converting 20m to 66ft. I don't share the same feeling that 66ft is overly precise. It just happens to be the right value, and the 20m to me doesn't necessarily imply a certain level of fuzziness. Could it simply be what the original calculations came up with, give or take a meter? I suppose the conversion could be manually re-written as 65 feet instead, since that looks a little less precise, if you want to go that route. Using Google to do the conversion] comes up with 65.6167979 feet; now THAT is overly precise!

Your idea to change that dense paragraph of numbers to a table is a pretty good one. I think it would make it more understandable. Cheers, --Itsfullofstars (talk) 02:18, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

After looking at the article again, I've gone ahead and rephrased the dimensions of the two craters to imply that the exact sizes are not known. In the process I dropped using the convert template for a couple of instances. If anyone else wants to tweak that paragraph some more, by all means do so. --Itsfullofstars (talk) 05:30, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the convert template. I wish there was some kind of tutelage on using or even finding templates.

I find the whole bit on stating units multiple ways to be more annoying than useful. If I need translating, I use a browser extension and click on it where it appears. I suppose if the sentence is so thick with values that the conversions overwhelm the text, it probably has too many values even without double-stating them.

Długosz (talk) 20:18, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Criticism section

Currently this article seems to be lacking a criticism section. A frequent complaint I hear is the cost of this mission, which superficially seems of little benefit especially to the anti-space-exploration pundits on the leftist side of the political spectrum (e.g. Jon Stewart ;-). I usually give the hand-waving reply that discovering a reservoir of water would reduce the cost of a moon base by billions of dollars, but that's just a WAG on my part.—RJH (talk) 21:33, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

79 million is chump change for a space mission anyway. It helped that the whole thing was done as a cost saving measure, since there was extra payload space on LRO's rocket. Designed and launched in 26 months too!Planetary (talk) 06:21, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

The real point is that this is a violation of international laws and treaties. The UN should bring sanctions against the U.S. for this. Also, in a science experiment the outcome is unknown. Therefore, the moon could have been destroyed. We're just lucky it wasn't...this time.BillyJack193 (talk) 12:40, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure spacecraft have been hitting the Moon since 1959 when the Russians hit it for the first time. List of artificial objects on the Moon. Why hasn't anyone complained? (BTW, the Moon has a surface area about that of Africa and Australia together, they are big places) Planetary (talk) 20:42, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

To put this concern in perspective see [1]. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 07:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.Planetary (talk) 21:16, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

This is seriously foolish of NASA to say that "We have found water on Moon.". ISRO(Indian Space Research Organization) through its Chandrayan mission found water on Moon several months back. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ruchin1234 (talk • contribs) 23:19, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

There's something called 'International cooperation' that you don't understand very well.Planetary (talk) 01:46, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh is it so that you understand it very well? Then please explain me the reason for need of announcement of 're-discovery of water' on Moon. It's like 're-inventing the wheel' again and going to the patents office claiming that "Hey, I invented the wheel!". How does this sound to you? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ruchin1234 (talk • contribs) 15:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

It's a direct in-situ confirmation of water that previous spacecraft (including Indian) have only used remote-sensing instruments for until now. Science usually works in this way, with progress and understanding coming over a long period of time. What do wheels and patents have to do with anything? Natural phenomenon are not patentable by definition. Planetary (talk) 19:07, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

NASA should have rather said "Water on moon confirmed after its discovery by Chandrayaan, ISRO.". And yes,I was just giving an example. I hope you got my point. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ruchin1234 (talk • contribs) 23:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes I got your point. This whole thing reminds me of when Neptune was discovered, both French and English astronomers debated who found it first. Discovery of Neptune Planetary (talk) 00:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

One criticism is that four months post-impact, apparently "more analysis" still needs to be done on the other spectra to announce any material analysis, which promises to be interesting in addition to the presence of H2O. 24.40.165.154 (talk) 05:22, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

images

please move the images to a commons gallery and link to it, the article is overloaded with images... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.78.20.139 (talk) 19:37, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Discovery foreshadowed in science fiction?

Hey, wasn't there an Asimov short story about an astronaut obsessed with finding water on the moon? He ventured into a crevasse in a crater with a rock pick and hacked away, but he stayed out too long, and his buddies had to retrieve him. He thought that he had failed to find water, but his buddies found a chunk of ice stuck in the cleats of one of his boots. 69.72.116.174 (talk) 07:57, 19 November 2009 (UTC) jj 11/19/09

Impact speed

I removed this sentence "The actual impact was later calculated to have been over 10,000 km/h (6,200 mph)." which cites a newspaper article that does not mention any recalculation. Nasa gives the impact velocity as 2.5 km/s which equals 9000 km/hr. The velocity of the LCROSS spacecraft had to be known to very high accuracy to achieve such an accurate hit. The only uncertainty might be the depth of the crater, as the impactor was accelerating as it fell, but that would be a small effect.--agr (talk) 12:52, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

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Where does that kinetic energy math come from?

"Centaur had nominal impact mass of 2,305 kg (5,081 lb), and an impact velocity of about 9,000 km/h (5,600 mph),[8][9] releasing the kinetic energy equivalent of detonating approximately 2 tons of TNT (8.86 GJ)."

KE = (1/2) * (2305kg) * [(9000km/hr) * (1000m/km) * (1hr/60min) * (1min/60sec)]^2 = 7.203 * 10^9 Joules

Where's the remaining 1.6 billion joules of energy coming from?