Stochastic Scribbles

The CDF collaboration at Fermilab has announced the observation of a new baryon Ω_b, which was also observed by the DZero collaboration, also at Fermilab, last year. It’s made up of two strange quarks and one bottom quark, which are of the sort we normally do not see in nature, and it has a lifetime of only a trillionth of a second. The observation of Ω_b by CDF fits well with the Standard Model of particle physics, but the interesting thing is that the measured mass conflicts with the measurement done by DZero.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has just entered lunar orbit! Now that it is in orbit around the Moon, it should take about a couple of months to settle into its final polar orbit 50 kilometers above the surface. Once it settles into its final orbit, the LRO should be spending at least a year making detailed maps of the surface of the Moon (among other things).

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

I just find this video taken by Kaguya’s terrain camera as it maneuvered itself into a crash with the Moon to be beautiful:

Unmated LRO/LCROSS at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) have been successfully launched and are on their way to the Moon. Both will take four days to reach the Moon, after which the LRO will settle into a polar orbit and start taking detailed maps of the Moon over a period of a year. More pretty pictures from the Moon!

However, LCROSS will not crash into the Moon after the four days: instead, it will use the Moon as a gravitational assist to enter a very large orbit around the Earth. This is so that the impact can occur at a high angle rather than the shallow angle that it would crash with if it were to impact the Moon directly. Of course, LCROSS won’t be crashing into the Moon by itself: it will first observe a much larger impact at the lunar south pole caused by the upper stage of the rocket that launched LRO and LCROSS, which will soon be followed by a much smaller impact from LCROSS itself. The impact will occur sometime in October, and with any luck, we might get definite confirmation of water deposits on the Moon.

The Space Shuttle Endeavor has sprung yet another hydrogen leak, delaying its launch yet again. The next opportunity to launch is going to be July 11, where hopefully the problem can be fixed. Let’s just hope that this doesn’t mean yet another delay for launching the LRO and LCROSS missions to the Moon, although I don’t see a reason why there should be one.