Bombing the Moon is it a joke?

[markcollier8]

I was dissapointed that to hear they were trying to hit the Moon with TNT looking for water the Moon belongs to the planet not to NASA. If I was the Man on the Moon I'd send the TNT right back to NASA with a note saying hands off you idiots might throw me off balance!!!:screwy:

[Omaroo]

This is a joke, right? :question:

[Kal]

NASA hasn't, and has no intention of, bombing the moon with TNT.

[multiweb]

Yay! :eyepop: I love those posts :nerd: Nearly spat my coffee on the keyboard mate. Too early for me. :lol:

[White Rabbit]

If you hit the moon with something heavy enough and fast enough you dont need TNT. Nasa hit the moon last month with 2 ton object to measure the amount of water in the ejecta. No TNT was used.

[Octane]

Yes, that's right, NASA has listened to the collective wishes of all the astrophotographers around the world. The last impact was just a test run to see how big a bomb they need to make to obliterate the Moon completely out of the sky. :P

[erick]

I'm disappointed that you listen to people who tell you such incorrect stories.

ps. the NASA site isn't hard to find to check such information

[renormalised]

Mark, I think you need to spend a bit more time learning off the people at this site, rather than listening to the scuttlebutt you're getting off the media and the general public. You should also be a lot more critical in your thinking when it comes to what you hear about.

In any case, even if they did drop a bomb on the Moon, it's not going to do any harm. The Moon won't be destroyed, it won't shift in its orbit or anything else you might think of (or Hollyweird produce). The Moon maybe a lot less massive than the Earth, but it is still an enormous mass. Even if you put every nuclear explosive we've got (or ever detonated) on the Moon, in the one spot, and then let it all off, all you'd do is blow a 10 mile wide hole in the ground and make the area radioactive. The Moon would ring like a bell for a short time, but it'd keep on orbiting the Earth in it's own merry way along the same path it always has. The Moon has enormous KE and angular momentum. All that energy released in that hypothetical I just wrote above...utterly insignificant. Wouldn't even be 10^-20 of the energy present in the Moon's own motion. Even if a large asteroid collided with the Moon....say Pallas, Vesta or even Ceres, they wouldn't impart enough energy into the impact to shift the Moon from its orbit. To generate enough energy to do that, you'd need a body almost as large as the Moon itself.

Thank the heavens that most of the public haven't cottoned onto the finding of a recent bit of research about how stable the orbits of the planets are over time. Next minute, there'd be people running about thinking that Venus, Mars or Mercury were going to collide with us!!!!. Then given the general ignorance of the public to anything scientific, or even rational, "rumours" would end up spreading like a bad case of the flu!!!.

Ha....might give Hollyweird another idea for a disaster movie...Mr Emmerich, start writing:P:D

[mswhin63]

Hi Mark,

I wouldn't worry about the comments to much as it was posted earlier that the media falsely represented the information from NASA by saying blowing up. I think the majority of the population got it wrong. Blame the media always jumping in before verifying the facts and get away with it.