Thursday, May 22, 2008

Of interest if you want to live on the moon

100 Explosions on the Moon

NASA has started watching the Moon to see just how often they can see the flash of a meteor hitting it. It turns out they can see a lot of flashes:
Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times.

"They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope."

As an example, he offers this video of an impact near crater Gauss on January 4, 2008.
Long term residents would live under a couple of meters of dirt to avoid radiation anyway, but here's another reason for them to find a nice cave to live in.

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