Two months ago, on March 17, 2013, a small space rock weighing just 88 pounds (40 kg), travelling at 56,000 miles per hour, smashed into the lunar surface creating a flash so bright that viewers looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion.
Slooh Space Camera will broadcast a free, real-time feed of the lunar impact site at Mare Imbrium on Wednesday, May 22nd, starting at 6:00 p.m. PDT / 9:00 p.m. EDT / 01:00 UTC (May 23), with observatory feeds from their world class observatory site in Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. Viewers can watch live on their PC/Mac or by downloading the free Slooh iPad app in the iTunes store and touching the broadcast icon.
The Slooh broadcast team will provide live commentary along with Bob Berman, author of numerous astronomy books and contributing editor and monthly columnist for Astronomy Magazine. The panel will discuss this violent event in the context of the recent flurry of near-Earth objects that have narrowly missed our planet, as well as the meteor of February 15 that exploded in the atmosphere over Siberia.
“This is an unprecedented, first-time-ever event,” says astronomer Bob Berman. “Apparently, a number of brilliant fireballs tore through Earth’s atmosphere just as the lunar surface received a visible impact bright enough to create a one-second point of light, seen by anyone watching the Moon at that moment. This suggests that a fairly dense swarm of meteoroids zipped through our orbit at that time, two months ago.”
The newly-created crater’s size is estimated as 197 feet (60 meters) — large enough to swallow a house. While researchers continue to investigate the event, Slooh will make best efforts to detect the new crater for viewers, if it exists, as they will take advantage of the Moon’s optimum lighting at the Mare Imbrium site on Wednesday night to view the impact region.
Contact:
Patrick Paolucci
+1 877-427-5664 x3
press@slooh.com
Slooh is the leader in live, celestial event programming with weekly shows featuring the great wonders of the Universe — shown live by observatories worldwide. SLOOH is powered by its members — men, women and children in 80 countries who have taken 1.8 million photos of 46,000 unique objects and events in the night sky since our launch on Christmas Day, 2003. Slooh’s patented instant imaging technology makes astronomical objects appear in true color and in real time over a 5 to 10 minute time frame.
