Aggression against Moon continues
Following Japan's recent unprovoked surprise attack on the Moon, USA with Australia's assistance is about to launch a second kamikaze assault, not once but twice. Whatever has the Moon done to provoke this wave of imperialist aggression?
Imperialist powers align to steal previous resources from weaker neighbors ... in this case, the moon's vital scarce commodity, H2O. I guess Marx was right! No wonder the Martians appear to be stacking up human skulls.A ROBOT explorer will soar into space next week on a kamikaze mission to punch a hole in the moon... Travelling at 2.5 kilometres a second, the empty two-tonne upper stage of the rocket that launched the probe will crash first, sending debris - rock, soil and, perhaps, long-frozen ice - at least 10 kilometres high... Travelling close behind, the 700-kilogram kamikaze robot, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, will plunge through the plume, sniffing for water. Four minutes later it too will smash into the surface.

Shouldn't this also be tagged "Wisdom of Heinlein?" Mining Luna for water?
They'd better be careful what they do--the Moon really is a harsh mistress...
Re: the Face on Mars, I am reluctantly forced to keep an open mind on this one. Many of the early denials by NASA were along the lines of "It isn't a face-shaped monument, that's impossible," "It's impossible because it couldn't be," and "We're from the government and we know better. You're crazy." Perhaps the guys pushing the story were crazy, but that is beside the point.
Then, around 1997 or 1999, they showed photos from the Mars Global Surveyor on the evening news, proving that there was no face. At the end of the report that I watched, Dan Rather (possibly another anchor, but probably him) said that in fact the pictures just shown were actually from another area, but still, there really wasn't a face. So based on the govt. response, I find myself wondering whether they're really not covering something up anyway. It's hard to imagine why they would, but it's hard to imagine why the federal govt. does many of the things it does.
As for the high-resolution image from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_face_HiRISE_MRO.png), I'd like to see that with the same lighting and camera angle as the 1976 pictures. If it turns out that it's a naturally formed mesa, then shame on NASA for being so incompetent.
Comment by Prof. X — June 15, 2009 @ 1:44 am