The mothership is called the "Shepherding Spacecraft" because it shepherds the booster to the Moon. After launch, the two ships will split up and head for the Moon, LRO to orbit, LCROSS to crash.Īctually, says Colaprete, "we're going to crash twice." LCROSS is a double spacecraft: a small, smart mothership and a big, not-so-smart rocket booster. The quest begins in late 2008 when LCROSS leaves Earth tucked inside the same rocket as Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a larger spacecraft on a scouting mission of its own. A better idea would be to mine water directly from the lunar soil.īut is it there? That's what LCROSS aims to find out. One option is to ship water directly from Earth, but that's expensive. Water makes an excellent radiation shield, and when you get thirsty you can drink it. It can be mixed with moondust to make concrete, a building material. Water can be split into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathing. NASA is returning to the Moon, and when explorers get there, they'll need water. The experiment couldn't be more important.
So we're going to hit one of those craters, kick up some debris, and analyze the impact plumes for signs of water." "We think there's frozen water hiding inside some of the Moon's permanently-shadowed craters.
Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery Team leader Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames explains how it's going to work: The mission's name is LCROSS, short for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. NASA researchers have a daring plan to find water on the Moon and they're going to do it by-you guessed it-crash landing. 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.Īll this experience is about to come in handy. The Moon's uneven gravity field tugs on satellites in strange ways, and without frequent course corrections, orbiters tend to veer into the ground. Crashing was much easier than orbiting, they discovered.
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. Data beamed back to Earth about the Moon's surface were crucial to the success of later Apollo missions.Įven after NASA mastered soft landings, however, the crashing continued. They captured the first detailed images of lunar craters, then rocks and soil, then oblivion. Five times, these car-sized spaceships plunged into the Moon, cameras clicking all the way down. NASA's first kamikazes were the Rangers, built and launched in the early 1960s. No member of the Plaster Cast team has knowingly come into contact with the virus, and all have been social distancing.This may seem hard to believe, but Luna 2 started a trend: Crash landing on the Moon, on purpose. *research indicates that the risk of passing COVID-19 via paper is very low- however, all sanitary precautions including hand-washing before writing and posting the letters are being adhered to. You can undertake this as a solo activity, or take part with your household. Your situation will be detailed in an original short story which is unique to you! This story will be handwritten and posted to you*.
Spaceship landing how to#
Alongside others who have selected the same world, you will decide how to respond to an adverse situation that you are faced with. This interactive experience asks you, the participant, to help in the creation of an imagined world. Homelands is for anyone who needs a creative outlet and sense of connection during this time. This collaborative project is a way to catalogue human ingenuity and provide escapism during a time of crisis. Participants are thrown into the centre of an imagined world and asked to creatively respond to the upheaval they find themselves in. Homelands explores what happens when everything you know has been turned upside down. Hidden but resisting, people live in fear of the invisible aliens who ‘vanish’ people and change the behaviour of animals… An ominous, yet optimistic dystopia where an alien invasion has taken place.