NASA’s great lunar fireworks finale fizzled.
After gearing up for the space agency’s much-hyped mission to hurl two spacecraft into the moon, the public turned away from the sky on Friday anything but dazzled. Photos and video of the impact showed little more than a fuzzy white flash.
In social media and live television coverage, many people were disappointed at the lack of spectacle. One person even joked that someone hit the pause button in mission control.
Yet scientists involved in the project were downright gleeful.
Sure, there were no immediate pictures of spewing plumes of lunar dust that could contain water, but, they say, there was something more important — chemical signatures in light waves. That’s the real bonanza, not pictures of geyser-like eruptions of debris, the scientists said.
The mission was executed for “a scientific purpose, not to put on a fireworks display for the public,” said space consultant Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator for science.
Scientists said the public expected too much. The public groused as if NASA delivered too little.
The divide was as big as a crater.
“We’ve been brainwashed by Hollywood to expect the money shot, like Deep Impact or when Bruce Willis saves us from a comet,” said physicist and television host Michio Kaku, who was not part of the mission. “Science is not done that way.”
Kaku and other experts, however, also faulted NASA for over hyping the mission, not being honest with the public about the images being a long shot.
“They should have put Steven Spielberg in charge,” Kaku said.
NASA’s LCROSS mission — short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — had all the makings of a blockbuster. Its main goal was to look for some form of water on the moon — something that could still turn up in those light wave chemical signatures.
A preliminary review of data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicated no signs of water in the debris viewed from the blast, NASA said late on Friday, but added that more study was needed.
Water on the moon could change NASA’s troubled plans for space exploration. It would make revisiting and putting a base on the moon far cheaper because the moon’s water could be used, Kaku said.
It was relatively cheap and last-minute by NASA standards. Just US$79 million, in about three years. It was elegant in its simplicity.
An empty rocket hull that would normally be space junk remained attached to the plucky little LCROSS until pulling away on Thursday night. On Friday morning, it smashed into a crater near the moon’s south pole.
Then the little satellite flew through what was supposed to be a 9.6km plume of dust from the crash, taking pictures and measuring all sorts of stuff, mostly looking for water.
Moments after the first crash, the smaller spacecraft itself hit the moon for a second impact.
The crashes created a man-made crater about one-fifth the size of a football field, Brown University geologist and LCROSS scientist Peter Schultz said.
It all worked perfectly, according to NASA. But there were no pictures of a plume. There may not have been a plume at all, or maybe it was just hidden or too small, said LCROSS scientist Anthony Colaprete.
The spacecraft, instead of spewing 9.6km of dust straight out, could have compacted the lunar soil — sort of like a rock sinking quickly in water instead of making a massive splash.
“We saw a crater; we saw a flash, so something had to happen in between,” Colaprete said.
The crater was the aftermath of the crash, and the flash was the impact itself.
The key is not in photographs, but in squiggly lines that show those complicated light waves, Colaprete said. Once they are analyzed — a task that may take weeks — the light waves will show whether water was present at the crash site.
“It wasn’t a dud. We got a gold mine of data,” said Kaku, a professor at the City College of New York and host of Sci Q Sundays on the Science Channel.
If those squiggly lines show there is ice just under the surface of the moon, it would make the lack of pictures worth it, he said.
“Ice is more valuable than gold on the moon,” Kaku said.
For about a decade, scientists have speculated about buried ice below the moon’s poles. Then surprising new research last month indicated that there seem to be tiny amounts of water mixed into the lunar soil all over the moon, making the moon once again a more interesting target for scientists.
A discovery of ice later this month, however, would not be quite the same as seeing the promised flashes through a telescope.
People who got up before dawn to look for the crash at Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory threw confused looks at each other instead. They tried to watch on TV because the skies were not clear enough, but that proved disappointing too.
Telescope demonstrator Jim Mahon called the celestial show “anticlimactic.”
“I was hoping we’d see a flash or a flare, evidence of a plume,” he said.
Labubu, an elf-like plush toy with pointy ears and nine serrated teeth, has become a global sensation, worn by celebrities including Rihanna and Dua Lipa. These dolls are sold out in stores from Singapore to London; a human-sized version recently fetched a whopping US$150,000 at an auction in Beijing. With all the social media buzz, it is worth asking if we are witnessing the rise of a new-age collectible, or whether Labubu is a mere fad destined to fade. Investors certainly want to know. Pop Mart International Group Ltd, the Chinese manufacturer behind this trendy toy, has rallied 178 percent
My youngest son attends a university in Taipei. Throughout the past two years, whenever I have brought him his luggage or picked him up for the end of a semester or the start of a break, I have stayed at a hotel near his campus. In doing so, I have noticed a strange phenomenon: The hotel’s TV contained an unusual number of Chinese channels, filled with accents that would make a person feel as if they are in China. It is quite exhausting. A few days ago, while staying in the hotel, I found that of the 50 available TV channels,
Kinmen County’s political geography is provocative in and of itself. A pair of islets running up abreast the Chinese mainland, just 20 minutes by ferry from the Chinese city of Xiamen, Kinmen remains under the Taiwanese government’s control, after China’s failed invasion attempt in 1949. The provocative nature of Kinmen’s existence, along with the Matsu Islands off the coast of China’s Fuzhou City, has led to no shortage of outrageous takes and analyses in foreign media either fearmongering of a Chinese invasion or using these accidents of history to somehow understand Taiwan. Every few months a foreign reporter goes to
There is no such thing as a “silicon shield.” This trope has gained traction in the world of Taiwanese news, likely with the best intentions. Anything that breaks the China-controlled narrative that Taiwan is doomed to be conquered is welcome, but after observing its rise in recent months, I now believe that the “silicon shield” is a myth — one that is ultimately working against Taiwan. The basic silicon shield idea is that the world, particularly the US, would rush to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion because they do not want Beijing to seize the nation’s vital and unique chip industry. However,
RSS