moon

Making a bigger splash than expected, the crash of an empty rocket stage in a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole last month kicked up a surprising amount of water ice and vapor, confirming the presence of a potentially valuable resource for future space travelers.

"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water," said Anthony Colaprete, the project scientist and principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. "And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount."

Holding up water jugs to make the point, he said "if you remember, a month ago we were talking about teaspoons going into glasses over football fields. Well, now I can say today that in the 20- to 30-meter (65- to 100-foot-wide) crater LCROSS made, we found maybe about a dozen of these two-gallon buckets worth of water."

And more than water. Data from the LCROSS instruments show signs of other compounds that may shed light on the moon's evolution.

"It's a whole lot more beyond the water," Colaprete said. "That's the exciting part in my mind, it's not only about the water now. There's actually a lot more here that we're going to be talking about in the months ahead, looking at the LCROSS data."

Said Greg Delory, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley: "This is not your father's moon. Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one that could tell us unique things about the Earth-moon system and the early solar system."… Read more

Turns out when we blew up the moon a few weeks ago, we found water! Yay! The bottled water companies are presumably planning their trips now. THIS is how we motivate us to get back to the moon! We also hear more from old man Murdoch on blocking Google from indexing his newspapers, and Dell launches a smartphone. Does anybody want it?

Rupert Murdoch to remove News Corp’s content from Google ‘in months’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/6559694/Rupert-Murdoch-to-remove-News-Corps-content-from-Google-in-months.html… Read more

I know most of you out there think we landed two Americans on the moon in 1969. Well, let me tell you that you're wrong. It's all a hoax! It was done on a sound stage and George Clooney and Dan Aykroyd were involved!

I mean, look at this real-life version of the Atari classic Lunar Lander vector game!

It took British engineer Iain Sharp less than $800 and a year to build this replica in his garage to honor the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, and it works almost like the real thing. It's powered … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For a few minutes Thursday, as I steered one of NASA's K10 intelligent robots across a small field of rocky, sandy terrain, I could almost imagine myself piloting the rover across the surface of Mars or the moon.

Until, that is, I realized I had pretty much no idea what I was doing, and saw that my struggles to steer the rover forward were actually sending it backward. Given that this little robot is worth at least as much as a mid-range Mercedes, I was relieved to see the eagle-eyed scientist standing a few feet away … Read more

Dynamic Biorhythms provides a tracking tool for monitoring the body's biorhythms. While its layout verges on overload, the program provides some interesting information about yourself.

The program's interface was terribly cluttered, trying to include several monitoring tools on a single screen. However, a visit to the incredibly insightful Help file, with its definitions of functionality and terminology, set us straight. The only thing that was not clear to us, and therefore kept us skeptical, was what source this biorhythm information comes from. Regardless, entering our birthday and sex revealed an incredible amount of detail. We were able to … Read more

Dr. Regener Sun-Moon-Calendar provides an all-inclusive view at what's happening on your calendar and in the sky above. Simple and easy to use, this is a great tool for anyone interested in the sun and moon.

We were initially disappointed this program had no Help file, but were immediately put at ease since the program's interface is laid out in a logical, navigable, and professional manner. All the major components were laid out in a way that even astronomical novices like us could understand. The actual calendar was a small part of the program, while a chart showing … Read more

In a brute-force search for ice on the moon, an empty 5,000-pound rocket stage traveling twice as fast as a rifle bullet crashed into a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole Friday, presumably blasting out tons of debris for examination by an instrumented probe that carried out its own kamikaze plunge four minutes later.

While the initial impact at 4:31 a.m. PDT did not prove especially dramatic--it was not even visible in real-time video from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS)--scientists said a camera sensitive to temperature variations clearly recorded the … Read more

NASA is sending a rocket into the moon Friday morning to study the composition of lunar material. But really, you stopped listening when you heard "blow up the Moon." And so did Cooley. For one small second, that made him love space. We also talk about the world's largest phishing sting and Windows 8. Yep, 8.

Operation “Phish Phry” nabs largest number of phishers ever. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8295945.stm

Wife bans FBI head … Read more

We're suckers for cool little utilities that more or less do one useful thing very well. MoonDriver is one of those programs. It places an image of the moon in its current phase on your desktop. That's it, pretty much, but it's much more useful to have than you might think at first. The moon influences many aspects of nature and our daily lives, everything from ocean tides to biorhythms, but understanding the lunar phases is worthwhile in and of itself.

MoonDriver places an icon in the System Tray; right-clicking it calls up the program's properties, … Read more