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(meteorobs) Re; Lunar impacts
I seem to recall that Hubble has great difficulty tracking the moon due to
the speed of it's apparent motion ! They tried it when they were looking
for water from the spacecraft that crashed into the moon. Even if they
could track it which I susspect will require 3 gyro's you would need to
look at the field of view of the cameras - I think the coverage is quite
narrow. The other constraint is integration time & time taken to save the
images - don't forget it is optimised for long exposures of faint objects.
I think I would go for some of the larger ground based telescopes with
adaptive optics & a high speed video camera.
One thing that strikes me about the 'impacts' is that the Apollo missions
left three corner reflectors on the moon to allow for the distance to the
moon to be monitored. I think that they are still firing lasers at these to
measure the distance - would these flashes be visible as TLP's ???
John Murrell
Message text written by INTERNET:meteorobs@jovian.com
>
David & all,
Surely the HST could watch the moon for impacts. Although it is
down to two gyros from six, two should be enough for the
Hubble to get a fix on the moon.
For every lunar impact seen by from the earth, the Hubble would see 100.
As only six were seen during the Leonids, odds on no
Geminid impacts will be seen from the earth, due to ZHR, velocity etc.
Only reason we might see any Geminid impacts is the mass of eyes
that will now be looking.
While I like the idea of humans making these discoveries, there is a
lot of science that could be gained with the HST. e.g. viewing a
large range of impacts will help us get a better idea of the sizes of
these objects. etc.
NASA?
Stuart.<
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