I have various additional introductory blog posts scheduled to go online throughout the day today, but in the mean time, blogworthy stuff is happening in the world — and the cosmos. Specifically:
[This] morning, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft will fly by the Moon only 9,000 km above the lunar surface. The purpose of the encounter is to put LCROSS in an elongated Earth orbit and position it for impact at the lunar south pole later this year. Live video streaming of the flyby begins at approximately 5:20 AM PDT on Tuesday, June 23, 2009. Click here to watch.
For those keeping score at home, 5:20 AM PDT is 6:20 AM Mountain Time, 8:20 AM Eastern Time, and 12:20 Greenwich Mean Time (the latter being, for reasons I’ll explain later, this blog’s time zone at present).
Anyway, tune into the webcast later this morning and watch!
By the way, if you’re wondering what “position it for impact” refers to, NASA is planning to crash this spaceship into the Moon — on purpose — on October 9. More info here. The impact may be visible from Earth.
I first heard about this on NPR last week, and needless to say, I think it’s a pretty awesome idea — not least because it’s something that sounds like it could have been dreamed up by Beavis and Butt-head. “Heh heh, heh heh, let’s crash something into the Moon. Heh heh. COOL.” Though I’m glad we’re not going quite as far as Frank J. proposed…
P.S. Alas, it turns out the Europeans and the Japanese thought of this first, and did it three years ago and earlier this month, respectively. So although we won the race to put a man on the Moon, we lost the race to crash a spaceship into the Moon. Darn it.
Still, I’m sure it’ll be way more awesome when we do it. Why? Because we’re America, dammit! Nobody crashes stuff like us! We invented NASCAR! We invented Windows! We invented Sarah Palin!