[_ Old Earth _] What a gross waste of time & money etc is this?

[MrVersatile48]

Best first see general question here:-

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... Am92hK&r=w



NASA wanna crash 2 space rockets into the moon to see if there's any frozen water??

Do they think it will be viable to transport any such water back to Earth's deserts?

With 2 more space rockets costing yet another £79 million?

Are they crazy??


NASA Takes Aim at Moon with Double Sledgehammer Jeremy Hsu
Staff Writer
SPACE.com
2 hours, 59 minutes ago



Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.


The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA's history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations.


"I think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude, but it's very economical," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.


NASA's previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the moon's poles before crashing itself into a crater at the lunar South Pole. Now the much larger Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, set for a February 2009 moon crash, will take aim and discover whether some of that hydrogen is locked away in the form of frozen water...


http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080227/ ... edgehammer


Must go

Ian

 

[Jayls5]

I don't understand why you speculated about bringing water back to our deserts.

It's to find out if there is liquid water on the moon, not to bring it back. I imagine the information is quite useful. Not only does it give us a better idea about the formation of our neighboring objects, we might find use for the water in the distant future on the moon.