The Chinese people are often stereotyped as being inscrutable, meaning “difficult to fathom or understand.” And that about sums up my reaction to yesterday’s news that the flight controllers at the Chinese National Space Administration intentionally sent the Chang’e 1 orbiter crashing into the Moon.
According to this report from the Xinhua news agency, ground zero was 1.50° south, 52.36° east. That’s a nondescript tract of Mare Fecunditatis about 90 miles (145 km) from the crater Messier.
The spacecraft, which carried eight experiments, rocketed toward the Moon on October 24, 2007, and had been in lunar orbit for 16 months. And it was beefy, weighing in at more than 2 tons. That’s comparable to the mass of a Centaur rocket that NASA’s hopes to drill into one of the lunar poles later this year, along with the LCROSS spacecraft. Chang’e 1’s impact undoubtedly made a sizable splash that should have been observable from Earth.
Meanwhile the editors of Businessweek seem to think that this qualifies as a “landing.”
Found by Mike Cosmi.
Well this is the same approach NASA and CCCP took when they were exploring lunar landing. In fact NASA’s first attempt overshot and moon and completely missed. They finally were able to crash into the moon and NASA called it a successful landing. They were using it to research their probe’s control in Lunar gravity as the probe approached the surface. Seems to be the same intent of the Chinese.
All of this intent was announced months ago. I guess – after sumpin’ happens – is newsier. Got people to go to skyandthickeyeglasses.com.
Bet the article was really written by Bubbles.
NASA LANDED on the Moon in 1969. You mean to tell me that with today’s technology– 40 YEARS in advancement– AND they can’t land on the Moon!; they have to crash it?!
And as a last hold out to the Moon landing hoax (if you can forgive me) is how does a refrigerator pack on your pack passing water in tubes keep the body’s 98.7 temperature regulated when the difference in temperature on the Moon from light to shadow is 200 degrees?
Maybe they were trying to bump the moon into the Earth. Oh, those dastardly Chinese!!!
You know, I have always had this nagging question: If they can take pictures of the mars rover (and even its tracks) from martian orbit, then why is it that I have never seen pictures of *any* of the moon vehicles, landings sites, tracks, flags, etc, etc etc … Maybe I just haven’t been looking for the right thing (but still).
Can point out some web sites from some of the many recent orbiting lunar crafts (and from different countries if possible) that DO HAVE this type of images.
Much appreciated.
Seeing what technology comes out of China, it’s not hard to see this happening. They were only trying to land.
#5 Probably because there’s no high resolution imager in lunar orbit. Until someone got the idea they could sweep up Helium 3 off the surface there was little interest with tight budgets.
#3
Technology really didn’t take off until just recently, about 20 years ago. And even at the start it wasn’t until the last 10-15 years that we seen great leaps in achievements.
Add to that the difficulty of space and I’m not all too surprise that we haven’t advanced much. Astrophysics isn’t easy…heck, space isn’t easy because we know so little about it. I mean, it’s out there and we’ve yet to really explore its mysteries.
RTaylor: Ya, you know I want to believe that too. But there is hubble; the space station; and even ultralarge telescopes on earth, etc, etc.
So I can’t buy that “we don’t have the technology” answer.
Really, I want to believe and regale without reservation, but that one nagging doubt remains.
duh! They were testing to see if it WAS made of cheese…
I wonder if we’ll see the data from the ALSEP seismometer networks left on the Moon by the Apollo landings. That network is quite sensitive.
#3, as far as the PLSS (spacesuit) the lunar astronauts wore, Google is your friend.
Also, read about lunar laser ranging retroreflector array left by Apollo 11.
Here’s the footage from Mythbusters about the reflector.
unless they’re just duplicating things already performed by the US and USSR for independent verification, there has to be some goal in doing it. although I can’t comment on the reason the Chinese did this particular event, there are many reasons to perform a kinetic impact of any distant object. if you have sensors trained on the object (that aren’t actually on the impactor), you can determine the chemical composition of the object from the ejecta. this actually works fairly well for surface mining purposes, because spectral analysis could be misleadin for anything under the surface that wasn’t present in the surface dust. In this case, they might be looking for water or He3 or even a ratio of alumina to other materials in the dust (for construction).
What’s so difficult to understand? From a scientific point it makes very good sense. Smack the very heavy spacecraft into the moon and observe the cloud that it creates.
Spectral analysis will reveal much about the mineral and chemical composition of the moon’s surface including such nice tidbits such as how much Helium 3, water, and aluminum there is.
Good info to have for a proposed moonbase.
#4, Space 1999.
AAArgg! #12 beat me to it.
Obviously they were trying to take out the secret US base established on the moon in 1975. (Moon base was initially set up to plant fake evidence that they did make it to the moon in 1969 – as per JFK’s challenge).
About using a telescope to view the landing sights.
“A telescope’s angular resolution (ignoring the muddying effects of Earth’s atmosphere) is limited by the diffraction of light in the optics. This diffraction limit depends linearly on the telescope’s aperture so that at visible wavelengths the resolution is about 14.1/D arcseconds where D is the aperture of the telescope in centimeters. For the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in low Earth orbit whose mirror is 2.4 metres (7.9 ft) across, the diffraction limited angular resolution is about 0.059 arcseconds which corresponds to about 110 metres (360 ft) at the distance of the Moon. In order to resolve an object 1 meter across into a single fuzzy spot would require a telescope 110 times larger than the HST, or about 250 metres (820 ft) across. But to resolve such an object with enough detail to recognize what the object is would require perhaps 100 times more resolution still, or a telescope whose aperture is some 25 kilometres (16 mi) across.”
http://tinyurl.com/cm8lpa
As an example of this, here are pictures of the moon taken by Hubble.
http://tinyurl.com/cm5ugd
Oh, and one more for you conspiracy theorist.
“Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon’s surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972. ”
http://tinyurl.com/yzobxu
Watch for them in a few months.
But then again, when conspiracy theorist are shown the error of their ways, they just expand the extent of their conspiracy to include the new evidence!
Adam Curry, are you listening?
#3;
There’s a phrase used to describe something that is trivially simple: “It isn’t rocket science…”
The reason for this phrase is because rocket science (read: space travel) is really frickin’ complex. Take some physics.
There is a target that was left on the moon to be used to bounce a laser off of to measure the distance between the Earth and the moon trying to refine the orbits of Earth and the moon a bit. This has been zapped thousands to millions of times. Anybody can use it.
The Chinese wanted to go to the moon and now they have. You can most likely locate their crater. That’s proof.
Much creepier are North Korea’s plans…
http://tinyurl.com/dn48y7
Obama found out the lunar landing was fake and asked the Chinese to smack their satellite into the exact same spot where the Americans were supposed to and cover it up.
its the Chinese emulatig the USA\USSR 30 years later…stop with the RED scare
Obviously NASA faked moon landing since there are no pictures of the leftover trash taken from the orbit… and Copernicus lied about Earth not being flat too… after all we ALL CAN SEE that the Earth is flat, don’t we? 😉
Debilism is inherited, and mostly the uneducated have many children.
Thats why even in the 30th century there always will be enough morons around to make fun of 😀
#20 Miguel,
Thanks! That was ROLF funny!
Also seemed almost real with all the crazy stuff coming out of that place.
I seem to recall NASA crashing a probe like this on purpose but the intent was to kick up a giant cloud of dust that could be analyzed by telescopes, spectrometers, and other sensors via another orbiting spacecraft. I am not sure if NASA did this on the Moon or one of the planets. I think it was intended to kick up what they hoped was subsurface water which could be recorded.
I doubt the Chinese could study any cloud of dust and debris from Earth with any chance of gaining any useful data. I bet the thing had something go wrong so they let it spiral in.
My understanding is the the new Moon race is to be the country that can claim a patch of the Moon that has available water. That is supposedly at the southern pole. THAT is where any moonbase would have to be located if the astronauts had any hope of long term habitation. With local ground water, even in ice form, the astronauts can create breathable oxygen and drinkable water.
Can I suggest something..
1. IF this wasnt a mistake..
2. IF we did go to the moon, and pick up rocks and dirt from the surface..
This was an IMPACT like the one on the Meteor that was a couple years ago..
CREATE a big hole, and spectrum analyze the stuff DEEPER then just the surface..
NASA crashed several probes onto the Moon on purpose, from 1961 to 65, with the RANGER series of spacecraft.
I TOLD the Chinese what to do. I can only guess “Spank the Monkey” lost something in translation
This tells it all doesn’t it:
http://forum.atimes.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6364&whichpage=1