Mars Curiosity Tweetup

After hearing such wonderful things from fellow skeptic, Trent Faust, about his Tweetup experience with NASA, I was super-excited to hear that I’d been chosen to attend the Mars Curiosity Tweetup and launch event in November. I debated whether to attend since the tweetup was scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving and the launch the day after. My wife, Sharon, encouraged and supported my attendance and I could not ignore this opportunity. I didn’t debate it for too long – only a few hours after receiving the invitation, I decided to attend.

Once I joined the closed FaceBook group dedicated to the event, information started pouring in like crazy. They wanted us all to vote on designs for patches, pins, teeshirts, etc. Suddenly, I felt like a pawn in a merchandising scheme. Many people in the group seemed to take a sense of pride in being part in what seemed to me a guerrilla marketing project.

I committed to buying three of the pins; but I expressed no interest in hats, teeshirts, patches, etc. I suppose NASA needs the money they get from all of the merchandise, but I felt no urge to participate much in this part of the festivities.  A good number of people attending are from out of state and some from overseas. So I get that they want to get all the souvenirs and memorabilia as they can get their hands on.

Some of us used the group page to arrange car pooling. There is also a special luncheon with an astronaut on Thanksgiving for those guests dining sans family due to participation. Some locals have also opened up their homes for people to sleep and/or dine on Thanksgiving evening. How’s that for Southern hospitality? So there are certainly some good uses for the Facebook group page.

What really interested me, though, is the opportunity to get a VIP tour of the Kennedy Space Center and front row seats to the launch. Yes – sign me up for that! After all, exploration is from where all of the excitement begins. What better way to celebrate Carl Sagan Day (Nov. 12) than with the thought of seeing a Mars Mission launch in the same month.

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover is slated to land on Mars in August 2012. Its two-year mission is focused on finding any possible remnant of microbial life starting with the most likely locations near its landing site. This little guy is going to be a hard worker collecting rock and soil samples, pulverizing them, collecting and transmitting the resulting data back home to the JPL. It will also be sporting a number of cameras to help researchers navigate and explore, not to mention snapping more great photos of the red planet for all to see.

You can follow twitter accounts @MarsRovers and @MarsCuriosity or navigate to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/ to find up to date information.

Future and past NASA Tweetup info can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup/index.html.

Carl Sagan Day info can be found at http://carlsaganday.com/

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), mounted to its Centaur rocket stage.

On June 18, 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS executed the goal of its mission on October 9, 2009, following and observing the planned impact of its spent booster rocket into the southern polar region of the Moon. The LCROSS probe itself impacted the same region four minutes later.

There was little fuel remaining in this rocket stage. Thus the event could be accurately described as an “impact,” or even a “crash,” though crash has a connotation of being uncontrolled, which is patently not the case here. “Bombs,” on the other hand, from what I am led to understand, explode, which is an activity of which this spent rocket stage was incapable.

Thus, NASA did not “bomb the Moon,” despite media reports to the contrary, typified below:

A new chapter in space exploration has been opened up after Nasa confirmed that their mission to bomb the Moon had found “significant quantities” of frozen water.

[The Daily Telegraph, November 13, 2009]

The author of the above story, Richard Alleyne, goes by the title “Science Correspondent.” Presumably he should know better.

But this journalistic “one small misstep” seems trivial when compared to the “one giant pseudoscientific leap” taken by Ellen Whitehurst (purveyor of such verifiably false notions as astrology, feng shui, and new age remedies) in her ill-informed babbling against LCROSS:

So, it looks like NASA’s mission to blast a hole in the surface of the south pole of the moon is continuing as previously planned and could occur any day now. NASA is sending a weapon [note: misleading word choice] to blow a five mile deep crater [note: WRONG] in the surface of that unassuming [note: Oh! Poor Moon! How I weep for thee!] orb in order to dislodge debris that may or may not hold traces of water, ice or vapor. This alleged [note: sinister plot?] water-seeking and lunar colonization experiment is believed to be an attempt at seeing whether there are any natural resources on the moon.

Now, there are some who believe that there might be an extraterrestrial base [note: and now she trots out unfounded conspiracy notions] sitting over on the dark side of the moon as well … citing eyewitness accounts given the NSA by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

[note: Wait, it gets better.]

If you want to tap into the powerful energies these autumn moons offer then wear oranges and yellows and purples. [note: WTF]

[The Huffington Post, October 7, 2009]

Rather than tapping into autumn moon energies with a colorful sweater, NASA’s LCROSS probe was on a mission of science.

The impact was intended to excavate lunar soil, or “regolith,” as well as some of the underlying rock beneath. This method was far cheaper and more rapid than sending some sort of automated backhoe to the Moon to perform the same task. The resulting plume of material, or “ejecta,” would be scanned by LCROSS as well as Earth-based telescopes in order to determine the chemical composition of the ejecta.

While the ejecta from the October 9 impact did not make for much a of visual show, analysis of the data did indeed confirm the presence of water in this region of the Moon which lies in permanent shadow. Any resource that would not have to be hauled up from Earth to a potential lunar base would make such a base easier and cheaper to maintain, so this discovery is a boon to any future human exploration of the Moon.