America, It’s Time to Blow Up the Moon

Less than an hour ago, while the hard working citizens of the east coast awoke to clear skies and a crisp October morning, NASA completed a mission that has lived in the hearts of the people since we landed on the moon forty years ago: to bomb the hell out of it.

NASA has its reasons, explains Discover magazine, and it’s to do with the gentle jostling of any potential water molecules out of the lunar surface, thanks to American firepower:

The idea is that over millions and billions of years, a lot of comets have hit the Moon. The water from these comets hits the surface and sublimates away…but if any settles at the bottoms of deep craters near the Moon’s poles, these permanently shadowed regions can act as a refrigerator, keeping the water from disappearing.

Detecting that water is tough. Radar results have been inconclusive, with some people saying there’s lots of water, and others saying there’s none at all. By impacting a probe there, any ice located at the impact site will be shot up above the lunar surface, where sunlight will break it up into H+ and OH- molecules, which can be detected.

Blow up the moon, bomb the moon, throw sharp objects at the moon—the media has had a hard time trying to figure out how to describe this event, which has a very logical objective despite America’s obvious need to blow as many things up on as many galactic surfaces as possible.

What the media may not know is that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

UPDATE: There is now video of the impact from NASA, and a report by a scientist and newcaster with fantastic accents, in which we learn this is not the first, nor the second, but the third intentional impact that has been made on the moon. The Soviets got there first in 1959 with the Luna II module, which was slammed into the moon as proof of an accurate trajectory into space, a mission the scientist in the video describes as “the most accurate shot in the history of mankind.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWO4rXkWgdo

Comments