Plus: Which Professions Need Coffee the Most and a Machine Made of LEGO Bricks Making Things Out of LEGO Bricks.

What We Learned from Bombing the Moon
It’s been a year since NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) rocket blew up some of the moon in the name of science. What did we learn from the explosion? Apparently a lot — including where to find water — as science and sci-fi blog io9 reports.

This week the journal Science published six research papers about what scientists learned from the debris that was thrown more than half a mile above the moon’s surface. (See below) The debris was ejected after the LCROSS dive-bombed a shadowy crater called Cabeus near the moon’s south pole. Once substances from the explosion were floating through space, satellites in the area and instruments back on Earth could get a good look at particles lurking in this freezing, sunless region. Many theorized it would be the ideal place to look for water, a theory that appears to be correct.

An announcement of the findings states:

About 155 kilograms (342 pounds) of water vapor and water ice were blown out of the darkness of the crater and into the LCROSS field of view, according to Anthony Colaprete from the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and colleagues from across the United States who analyzed data from the near-infrared and ultraviolet/visible spectrometers onboard the shepherding spacecraft. They estimate that approximately 5.6 percent of the total mass inside Cabeus crater (plus or minus 2.9 percent) could be attributed to water ice alone.

One Science report details how researchers also discovered hydroxyl, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia, free sodium and even silver. Brown University’s Peter Schultz explains how the impact allowed his team to find these compounds once they were ejected far above the moon’s surface:

NASA-engineered collision spills new Moon secrets from Brown PAUR on Vimeo

Researchers say the rocket impact ultimately created a crater about 25-30 meters wide, and that somewhere between 4,000 kilograms (8,818 pounds) and 6,000 kilograms (13,228 pounds) of debris, dust and vapor were blown out of the dark crater and into the sunlit LCROSS field of view.

When the empty LCROSS rocket slammed into the pitch-black bottom of Cabeus crater, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was also in orbit around the moon, captured many more important details about the impact.

Check out the abstracts for the related articles in the latest issue of Science:

• “Detection of Water in the LCROSS Ejecta Plume”
• “The LCROSS Cratering Experiment”
• “LRO-LAMP Observations of the LCROSS Impact Plume”
• “Diviner Lunar Radiometer Observations of the LCROSS Impact”
• “Diviner Lunar Radiometer Observations of Cold Traps in the Moon’s South Polar Region”
• “Hydrogen Mapping of the Lunar South Pole Using the LRO Neutron Detector Experiment LEND”

Which Professions Need Coffee the Most
Today people are working longer hours, shouldering heavier workloads and depending more on caffeinated coffee to ease fatigue, stimulate awareness, elevate mood or become generally twitchy.

According to a recent survey jointly commissioned by Dunkin’ Donuts and CareerBuilder.com, 32 percent of workers said they need coffee to get through the workday. The coffee retailer and job-search site partnered to determine the latest coffee consumption trends brewing in the workplace.

Based on responses from more than 3,600 workers nationwide, the survey found that 43 percent of coffee drinkers claim to be less productive if they don’t have their joe on the job. The professions with the highest proportions of workers stating they are less productive without coffee vary widely. The following are the top dozen professions whose workers appear to need coffee the most:

12) Government workers
11) Machine operators
10) Scientists
9) Marketing/PR pros
8) Teachers
7) Engineers
6) Food preparers
5) Financial/Insurance sales reps
4) Designers/Architects
3) Hotel workers
2) Physicians
1) Nurses

Thirty-seven percent of American workers drink two or more cups of coffee during the workday.

LEGO Brick Robot Self-Replicates
As a tribute to the emerging trend of 3-D printing, a software engineer has built a 3-D printer made of LEGO bricks that can build stuff with LEGO bricks.

Dubbed the MakerLegoBot, the robot “is itself built entirely out of the Lego system, which raises the possibility — theoretically at least — that the machine could, with some modifications, build a copy of itself,” Wired’s Gadget Lab blog says. “The 3-D assembler uses three Lego Mindstorms NXT Bricks, along with 9 NXT motors.”

Image credit: Will Gorman/BattleBricks.com

“A Java Application that runs on the PC takes an .ldr MLCad file, determines a set of print instructions, and then sends the instructions via USB over to the MakerLegoBot for printing,” its creator, Will Gorman, writes at BattleBricks.com. “The core concept that makes 3-D print of Legos possible is the sticky grab and axle release mechanism. The printer head selects from an array of Lego bricks, moves to the correct location, and then places each Lego in its determined spot.”

Cheers.