nasa attacks the moon

I'm sure Nasa knows what they're doing.

 

I was pretty excited to see the giant cloud, so I got up early and dug out my telescope. Unfortunately it is so damn cloudy today I can't see anything. :dry: The one day I actually want a clear sky it clouds over.

 

Lol, "bombing the moon"? "space failure?" Aren't you getting a bit needlessly dramatic here?

*engages scientist mode :icon_wink

First of all, there isn't a cheaper way to do testing than by impacting something and seeing how it breaks. Landing probes is enormously expensive (you'd be looking at several times the current budget if they wanted to do that) and wouldn't have given us more useful results.

And there's no need to be sad about it either. No moon people got bombed out of their houses The moon is a big rock, and we hurled a smaller pieve of metal against it to see what happens. Compared to the hundreds of much larger meteors that hit it every year, we really didn't even make that big of a mark.

And I wouldn't call it a failure. You do experiments to get an answer on a question. Sometimes the answer is "no". But that's a valid answer too. "Yes" is more spectacular, but you can't call the experiment a failure because you didn't get the answer you wanted!

 

So clearly we need to use bigger rockets.

The way we learn is by smashing things together and seeing what happens. We do it with atoms, smaller particles, and the moon. Why? So we can see what's inside. Drilling? You're recommending something like a biopsy. It's expensive, difficult, and it does a lot of damage anyway. The method we're using here is simpler, cheaper, and probably more reliable. Just because it didn't work at first doesn't mean there's something wrong with the method. Do you know how difficult it is to land something on the moon? Intact? Even IF we could land robots on the moon and even IF we could create these magical robots to somehow drill for miles in multiple places over a wide are and detect water, the cost and manpower simply isn't worth it. Especially when we need to dedicate resources towards finding other things on the moon *cough* Helium-3.

 

Bombing usually involves Explosives

 

When I heard this I thought they were pulling my leg. This is one of the most stupid things I've heard in my life. Who cares if there was (past tense) water in the moon? Isn't it enough that we messed up our own planet, we need to go and do the same to our natural satellite? Bah.. Money thrown out when there is so much hunger in this world :dry:

 

there is absolutely no reason to be upset over this.

it's exceptionally important, for the purpose of furthering our knowledge of the origins of our solar system. We bothered to send people up there, shouldn't you be railing against the folly of that? Far more money was spent on that than on this relatively tiny (and yet monumentally important) project.

 

you know you're right they are destoying the moon

 

all i can say is this: there are gonna be some HUGE problems when they realise the moon's made out of cheese after all!!!

 

They didn't "attack" it. How can you attack an inanimate object? Oh, and lol @ above poster.

 

there ought to be more uproar over the reckless assault by Schumacher-Levy 9 on Jupiter than this tiny impact on the moon.

Use common sense, people. Leave your uproar where it belongs... In rational town.

 

i an understand that they are trying to test out theories, but are they ABSOLUTELY positive there are no life forms on the moon? because that would be my problem, needless slaughter of things we didn't know existed... i don't know how much NASA knows, but they better know what the fuck they were doing before we do something stupid.

 

While this is a fascinating (and possibly risky) procedure, this was neither urgent nor important at the moment. We should concentrate on Earthly and world matters before tackling, figuratively and literally, outer space what with the state of the world.

 

I think NASA should not have done that. The moon has been a very significant icon since the dawn of mankind. It was pretty disrespectful of them to go and deface "public property," as it were, since the moon technically belongs to the citizens of Earth and not one specific country. I don't really care if it was the cheapest way to determine if water had been present in the past, or is currently present. If it's really that important to find out, then they'd be able to argue that and get enough money to do it in a less destructive way.

Also, concerning space dust and debris, aren't we always getting told about how much space trash there is, and how even a few specks of it can destroy a shuttle, etc, etc, etc? So how exactly is kicking up a 10-km column of 350 tonnes of debris going to help that situation? Obviously, most of the dust is not going to settle because of the relatively low gravity on the moon, even if the dust cloud wasn't observed in actuality.

*giggles* Um, really? How about the "needless slaughter" of the millions of bacteria you kill when you use hand sanitizer, soap, or any other surface cleaner?

 

Harmful bacteria is different from alien life. One knowingly puts us at risk for disease, the other could be completely innocent beings.

 

Sorta. Bacteria probably don't "knowingly" do anything, though humans know that some put us at risk for disease. But surface cleansers don't distinguish between harmful and benign bacteria. And I'm fairly sure that single-celled organisms can't be innocent or guilty. And if they're much bigger than single cells, then NASA would have either found them by now, or proved its complete incompetence by not finding them.

 

You read what I posted wrong. LOL I'm not assigning human emotions and thought process to bacteria, I was talking about how humans view bacteria.