SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
You Can Watch NASA Give the Moon a One-Two Punch
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- NASA will throw a one-two punch at the big old moon Friday and the whole world will have ringside seats for the lunar dust-up.
NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon's south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there's any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water--a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon--is hidden below the barren moonscape.
The crashing spaceship was launched in June along with an orbiter that's now mapping the lunar surface. LCROSS--short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross--is on a collision course with the moon, attached to an empty 2.2-ton rocket that helped get the probe off the ground.
Read more...
Click here to listen to podcasts of American Scientist Pizza Lunches, informal lectures where scientists present new research to non-scientists. Originally intended for science communicators in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina, the audio slideshows are now available to anyone online. New talks are posted periodically during the academic year.
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.