NASA To Fire a Rocket Into the Moon: Follow it on Twitter and Facebook

18 06 2009 – NASA has always done cool things, but its latest mission is really a sci-fi geek’s dream come true, as it includes flying a rocket into the moon, triggering a huge explosion.

The purpose of the mission is to discover whether there’s frozen water in the craters near the moon’s south pole. If water is indeed found, it could have very important implications for further human missions on the moon, as a potential source for oxygen (you know why we need that) and hydrogen (for rocket fuel).

You can read about the mission in detail here, here, and here, but here’s a very short version: LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) will send the Centaur rocket which helped it out of Earth’s orbit into the moon at a high speed, ejecting debris from the surface of one of moon’s craters. LCROSS’ specialized instruments will then analyze the debris for the presence of water, before impacting the moon itself.

LCROSS’ launch date is today; it’s scheduled to launch at about 08:30 PDT. What’s especially cool about this mission is the fact that NASA is providing us with a variety of ways to follow the launch and the mission during the next four months.

First, you can watch the launch live at NASA TV. You can also follow LCROSS on Facebook and Twitter. Finally, for pictures related to the mission, check out NASA’s Twitpic account.

If everything goes well, LCROSS should impact the moon in about 111 days. NASA promises the moon won’t be damaged (much), but you never know with these scientist types. We’ll be watching closely.

Source: mashable.com

Video: Tweets From Space: NASA Turns To Twitter And YouTube To Reconnect With The Public

08 05 2009 – “I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.”

Truer words have never been spoken by a YouTube commenter.

NASA astronaut Mark Polansky, who will be commanding the next mission to the International Space Station, has just posted a video to NASA’s official YouTube channel inviting YouTubers and Twitter fans to take part in his next mission, submitting video questions via YouTube and following mission updates over Twitter.

To ask a question, Polansky says to create a video of around thirty seconds and post it to YouTube, then send it to his Twitter account using an @reply. He’ll respond to the questions on NASA TV, which is broadcast nation-wide.

Polansky won’t actually be the first person to Tweet from space – that title will likely belong to Mike Massimino, who plans to Tweet from Space Shuttle Atlantis, which embarks on mission STS-125 in less than three days.

NASA has recently been making a big push in using modern consumer technology, the web, and social sites to reach a broader audience. Yesterday it launched a collection of very impressive Photosynth galleries of the ISS and Mars Rover. And they have more exciting releases in the works. This is something that is long overdue – the public may not be as enamored of space missions as it was a few decades ago, but the feats these astronauts are undertaking are no less impressive. And frankly I’d much rather follow the updates of true heroes than yet another celebrity on Twitter.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if alien races will stumble across the tweets and conclude that our brains are only capable of interpreting 140 characters at a time.

Source: TechCrunch