Caveman Science in Outer Space
By Christopher MooreI’ve always been a big fan of “Caveman Science.” Take a big rock, smash something, and see what happens. Ahhhh, satisfaction. As a child I would use whatever I could to deconstruct whatever I could, with the purpose of learning how the thing worked. Of course, I usually just blew it up only to find out that blown-up stuff doesn’t work anymore.
I’m not the only grown man who never grew up, though. NASA scientists are planning on blowing up a huge comet to … well … learn what its made out of. Imagine wanting to know what a radio is made of. To find out, stick a M80 Firecracker into the thing, light it, stand back, and after the explosion look around and see what came out. You’ll find transitors, capacitors, burnt wires, a few screws and who knows what else. That’s how we are going to learn about a comets composition.
Scientists know very little about comets, and this mission should shed some new light:
“A sample return would be the ultimate, but this is one exciting mission because for the first time we’re actually reaching out and we’re going to create our own crater,” says Donald Yeomans, a senior research scientist at JPL in California — and an adviser on the movie Deep Impact, which shares its name with the spacecraft to be lauched.
“We’ll understand how the comet is put together, its density, its porosity, whether it has a surface crust and underlying ices, whether it’s layered ice, whether it’s a wimpy comet or whether it’s a rock-hard ice ball. All of these things will become apparent after we smack it.”
The energy produced by the impact of the spacecraft into the comet will be the equivalent of about 4.5 tons of TNT. Not a bad little slap. As Richard Grammier, manager of NASA’s Jet Propultion Laboratory, puts it: “It would be like it’s standing in the middle of the road and this huge semi coming down at it at 23,000 mph, you know, just bam!”
Liftoff is targeted for Jan. 12 and the impact, which will look like a fireworks display when viewed through a telescope, should occur on … get this … July 4th.
Ug like science. Ug want hit rock. Make boom.
Or as any middle school boy will tell you, blowing stuff up is cool.
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I agree on caveman in Space. However, it’s the way we get there that makes me very concerned. Rockets should be in museums not as the primary way we get there. We do have better ways of getting there, it is being kepted a close secret. I am tired of NASA supporting chemical companies. Rockets are very dangerous and expensive, and takes so much fuel to do the job. As a world, we can put together the necessary research to build cheap and safe way into orbit. The rest is down hill, to use a line from NASA scientist. In the mid 1960’s, I submitted a working diagram of an electromagnetic impluse engine, NASA sent me a very nice letter stating that they had good electromagnetic
impulse device and thanked me for my interest. So far, I have not scene any such device being used by NASA. Some food for thought.
Comment by Tomie — Thursday -- January 13th, 2005 @ 4:14 am
NASA uses and publishes public reports on all types of engines. Try http://jpl.nasa.gov. Ion drives and the like are great for specific applications, but not for lifting huge payloads into orbit, at least not yet. Rocket fuel is relatively cheap and fairly reliable. Economics (with a little bueracracy
dictates our means of “getting there”.
Comment by Chris Moore — Monday -- February 21st, 2005 @ 11:05 am