So if you didn’t know already late last night NASA deliberately crashed two probes into the moon to try and kick up a dust cloud hopefully containing water. It turns out it was an epic failure with nothing happening.
The spacecraft ploughed into a 60-mile-wide crater called Cabeus, which is permanently in shade at the lunar south pole. Scientists believe the crater may contain frozen water and expected it to be kicked up by the impact. One theory is that the impact site was unexpectedly hard and that rock and soil gouged out by the impact failed to rise high enough to be lit up by sunlight.
“If it turns out to be as dull as it looked, I’d imagine the soil just didn’t respond as was hoped to being hit,” said Vincent Eke, an astronomer at the University of Durham who helped Nasa choose the impact site. “It might mean we don’t get sufficient data, which would be a shame,” he added.
So all those people who called Nasa’s headquarters in Washington DC with a flood of calls from people objecting to the agency “bombing” the moon, fearing disruption to tides on Earth and even their menstrual cycles have nothing to worry about.
But NASA have some explaining to why their predicted impact that would throw up a six-mile-high cloud of lunar dust and rock which could be scanned for evidence of frozen water didn’t happen.
It just goes to show we do not know as much about the world as what we think we do and we should never taken anything in science as fact, it is all theory until a new theory replaces it.
