A Mars Odyssey

“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.”

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Over a period of two-and-a-half years, NASA astronomers have been seeing flashes of lights on the Moon to a count of 100. The above January 4, 2008, photograph of a meteor hitting the Moon is located at Gausse, a large lunar crated located on the Moon’s near side belonging to the walled-plain lunar formations. The monitoring program of the flashes began in late 2005 once NASA had announced their plans to return astronauts to the Moon. The minute the program was put into effect, a flash was detected on November 7, 2005, according to team leader Rob Suggs of the MSFC, coming from the Comet Encke

The meteorite fragment that hit in January is from the extinct comet 2003 EH1, with the Earth-System system passing through the comet’s tail which produces the Quadrantid meteor show every January. Not a problem on Earth, as Quuadrantids produces flashes of light when they are destroyed. But the Moon is airless, causing them to hit the Moon’s surface and explode.

Off-shore hits are also being observed, due to a huge swarm of space junk—bits of comet dust and chips from old asteroids– massively filling the inner solar system. Not large hits, the danger lies in its significant numbers. Earth is not entirely eliminated from meteor hits, with sporadic impacts arriving with a ration of 2:1. But the Moon is never impact-free with the any time of the year any safer than another.

According to NASA astronomers, the major concern lies in the secondary articles, not the primary hits even though when the Moon is hit by meteorite particles, debris flies in millions of directions. One meteoroid after it hits can produce a thousand “secondary” particle sprays, traveling at velocities second only to a speeding bullet. The odds of a direct primary hit are low, but odds for a secondary hit are much more significant. “Secondary particles smaller than a millimeter could pierce a spacesuit,” notes Cooke.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 7:35 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.