It's the end of the world ..

Excuse the lack of updates, the weather has been great and I did not have much interest in compiling data for a lengthy post interspersed with the odd bad pun.

So this one will have to do and I'll get right to it...the sky is falling!
Or so one is almost inclined to believe when perusing some of the (paranormal)news sites. NASA's mission to 'bomb' the moon being one of the catalysts for panic responses or otherwise evoking outrage. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS , is apparently going to severely annoy the Man in the Moon causing him to strike back at us. Ok ok, there is no such thing. But have a look around for some articles and pretty soon you will be reading about alien bases on the dark side of the moon and how this kinetic impact will perturb them.

It's all well and good to theorize on the reasons behind such endeavors, but rather conveniently the fact that the Moon has been impacted by spaceships since 1959 is overlooked.

Even after NASA mastered soft landings, however, the crashing continued. In the late 1960s and early 70s, mission controllers routinely guided massive Saturn rocket boosters into the Moon to make the ground shake for Apollo seismometers. Crashing was much easier than orbiting, they discovered. The Moon's uneven gravity field tugs on satellites in strange ways, and without frequent course corrections, orbiters tend to veer into the ground. Thus the Moon became a convenient graveyard for old spaceships: All five of NASA's Lunar Orbiters (1966-1972), four Soviet Luna probes (1959-1965), two Apollo sub-satellites (1970-1971), Japan's Hiten spacecraft (1993) and NASA's Lunar Prospector (1999) ended up in craters of their own making.

You can read more about that here. Even ignoring that the Moon is regularly impacted by meteoroids. One of the other concerns mentioned often is that NASA will be breaking 'space law' with the crashing of LCROSS into the Moon's surface. Right here on good old planet Earth there are frequent detonations of explosives in rock quarries etc, these are not considered acts of war either to my knowledge. And this appears to me as being essentially the same thing. Oh and LCROSS carries no explosive payload.
A lot of the sites discussing this topic talk about the impact creating a 5 mile crater, this appears to be the result of misquoting sources and the same error being repeated. To illustrate the error, from the same source as quoted above, "Researchers expect the impact to gouge a crater ~20 meters wide and throw up a plume of debris as high as 40 km." (emphasis mine) Which is a far cry from 5 miles (1600 meters = 1 mile). The scheduled impact should take place on October 9th and is visible from Earth by telescope.

In the extremely unlikely event that we find ourselves enmeshed in a galactic war by October 10th you may leave your 'I told you so'-comments here. Until then you can check out these videos.



My apologies, you can rinse out the aftertaste of REM with the next video.