Today I’m sitting in a large conference room at JPL listening to the proceedings of the WISE Operational Readiness Review. This is one of a zillion big reviews that we have to pass before we can launch. The purpose of the ORR is to demonstrate that we are ready to operate WISE once we’re on-orbit; it’s two very full days. The old joke in the space biz is that you’re ready to launch when the paperwork outweighs the thing that you’ve built. Judging by the volumes of documentation sitting at the back of the room, I’d say we’re about there. These reviews are one of the few times each year that I have to haul a suit jacket out of my closet, since I have charts to present on the calibration of the WISE instrument.

At present, we’re the next JPL mission on the runway, so to speak. The only obstacle now is that the Worldview-2 satellite is sitting on our launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They are scheduled to launch tomorrow morning. Keep your fingers crossed that they go! It’s kind of like a spacecraft conga line – we can’t go until they do, and if they delay too much, we’ll get bumped until after the holidays. The launch is scheduled for 11:38am tomorrow, and I may run outside to see if I can see it from here. Vandenberg launches are easily visible from LA at night, but I’m not sure about the daytime visibility. UPDATE: You can catch the launch on a live webfeed here. Looks like they’re go for launch!!  UPDATE2: Worldview-2 has been successfully launched, and WISE is now next in the queue.  This was the 91st consecutive successful Delta 2 rocket launch dating back to 1997.  Delta 2 has achieved 144 successful launches in 146 flights, a nearly 99% success rate.  This makes me extremely happy.  What a great rocket.

Another fun thing coming up this week is the impact of the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission’s Centaur upper stage on the Moon. The idea is that the burned-out rocket motor will hit the Moon and throw a big plume off the surface, and LCROSS will film it with a variety of visible and infrared cameras. Sort of like the Deep Impact mission, only on the Moon.

Speaking of the Moon, here is one of my favorite videos (from Kokubo et al. 2000) that illustrates how we think the Moon formed as a result of an impact by a Mars-sized protoplanet when the Earth was very young. (WARNING: The video file is 19 MB, so it may take a while to load. It also has sound.)

(I particularly love the techno soundtrack. Why can’t I hear a soundtrack like this when I’m working? It would make reducing data so much more dramatic and exciting. If I could have a superpower, it would be to hear the soundtrack of my life. How cool would that be?)

The evidence for the giant impactor hypothesis is strong: The Earth has a fairly high density, owing largely to its dense iron core. The Moon has a much lower density, suggesting that it has much less of an iron core. However, the ratio of oxygen isotopes found on the Earth and the Moon is exactly the same, suggesting that they formed at the same distance from the Sun. These two pieces of evidence are hard to reconcile unless you have a large impactor which knocked most of the low-density crust off the Earth, which then formed the Moon; the high-density iron core remained in the Earth. The creation of the Moon had profound implications for the Earth, and it’s probably why our planet is the lovely, habitable place that it is (provided we don’t trash it, of course).

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