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After a 25-minute descent, Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe has successfully crashed on the Moon's surface, taking images of the descent like these ones and making yet another man-made hole on the battered Earth's satellite.
When NASA released this image from their Lunar Orbiter 1 back in 1966, the first photograph ever of the Earth rising above the Moon's surface, it was low resolution but they still amazed the world. This week, they have surprised every space aficionado re-releasing the same image in ultra-high definition. The cool part now is that NASA hasn't used any upscaling or magical infinite zoom-in filter from CSI. Instead, they have created a new technology that uses refurbished analogue machines and a new digital process that fully extracts the information stored in the program's old magnetic tapes, something that was impossible to do in the 60s. Click on the image to watch it in its 3673 x 1740 pixel glory.
Romain Jerome's Titanic DNA Watch was such a success that the company has decided to take the concept to the moon (literally) with their new Moon Dust DNA watch. Like the Titanic version, the moon watch will feature actual artifacts. The face includes dust from a rock retrieved during our first mission to the moon, the case is made from steel from the Apollo 11 spacecraft and the strap will be made up of fibers from a spacesuit worn during the ISS mission. Okay, that...is...awesome. But now for the sticker shock—a symbolic quantity of 1969 watches will be made to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Several different versions will be available at prices that range from $US15,000 to $US500,000 apiece. [Romain Jerome via The Age via Born Rich]
With help from its moon photographing probe, the Chang'e 1, China's created the country's first full map of the lunar surface and they're calling it the best one yet. According to the heads of the space program, the map is the most complete image of the moon's surface, as well as the richest in detail, in the world.
November 9, 1967, T-minus 8.9 seconds: Thousands of gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen begin coursing through the giant centre F1 rocket engine: The Saturn V's ignition sequence has begun. Next, two outer engines are lit, followed 300 milliseconds later by the other two, ignited in pairs to avoid toppling the 364-foot rocket above. Nine seconds after all five engines go to full thrust, the first Saturn V rocket begins to lift from the launchpad, taking the unmanned Apollo 4 check-out module into space.
NASA's Ares 1 rocket may be facing another large technological hurdle before it can take part in the future lunar missions: it's apparently in danger of banging into its own launch tower if the wind is up. Actually, the wind needs only be a gentle-sounding 20kph from the south-east to cause problems, and it's all to do with how the rocket's solid fuel motor causes it to "hop" on ignition, before it powers upwards.
John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace has won the $US350,000 Level One X-Prize Lunar Lander Challenge. As this video shows, their spaceship blasted off the designated area, got up to 150 feet, and then hovered for 90 seconds at that altitude to land with absolute precision on a pad 150 feet away. And they did it twice. Armadillo was also the first one to try the $US1.65 million Level Two challenge, but unfortunately crashed badly on that attempt, as the next video shows:
It's been a decade since NASA's Lunar Prospector satellite gave tantalising hints—in the form of unexpectedly sparkly reflections—that the Moon's poles may have frozen water at or near the surface, but new data from a Japanese satellite looks like it's quashed the rumour. Kaguya's been in space since late last year, but it's now trained its very highly sensitive cameras, that can see even into the near darkness inside polar craters, on the same spot of the moon Prospector saw. And all it found was dull lunar soil. There may still be water buried beneath the surface of course, but this discovery may be bad news for hopes of using plentiful hydrogen for fuel cells when we go back to the Moon in a decade or so. [NewScientist]
The Chandrayaan-1, literally "Lunar Craft", launched today from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, on the southeastern coast of India. The spacecraft will orbit the Moon for two years, charting its mineral composition, searching for ice, and helium-3, all three fundamental for the establishment of a lunar outpost. Or a call centre. It can go either way. Chandrayaan-1 is India's first mission to our satellite, and it's also NASA's return to the moon after the Apollo missions:
The NY Times TierneyLab blog recently had a great post on a 1952 concept sketch for a "Moon Rocket," which recently sold for $US132,000 in an auction. Created by famed astrophysicist Wernher von Braun (mentioned in the movie October Sky like 3,269,728 times), the sphere-happy concept called for the spacecraft to be powered by 30 rocket motors, shortwave radio antenna and a solar mirror which could vaporise mercury, in turn powering a turbo generator to the tune of 35kW.
