Why is NASA playing with marbles?
March 20, 2007 Bill Cooke, NASA scientist, is regularly shooting marbles into carefully arranged piles of soil. Each marble explodes on impact with a spectacular blast of light and leaves a nice-looking crater in the soil. Why is NASA paying this man to do something most of us would do for free? First, most of us are not qualified to propel marbles for NASA. And second, Mr. Cooke is gathering all sorts of mathematical data from his marble adventure. He’s planning for our return to the moon . If you think about how much space stuff hits the atmosphere-protected Earth on a regular basis, you can begin to imagine how many meteoroids and comet-expelled projectiles smash into the moon every day. The moon has no atmosphere protecting it. Anything can hit the moon, completely unhindered. So while a meteoroid the size of a softball in space would never even make it to Earth’s surface — it would burn up completely in Earth’s atmosphere — that same meteoroid is still the size of a softball whe
