Sunday Status: Water on the moon? and ActionScript Development Continues

Today marks the first ever Sunday Status post on BW Science Labs, with many to hopefully follow. In a Sunday Status I'll talk about science news on a global scale, and then a micro* scale at BW Science Labs.

Global

The other day I got an email from NASA that boasted new discoveries on water on the moon. I figured that it was probably another "on August 27th Mars will be as big as the moon!" hoax**, so I disregarded the message. However, sure enough word of water on the moon spread and turned out to actually have merit. The Apollo mission 40 years ago brought moon rocks back to earth for study, and though trace amounts of water were found researchers assumed that it was from contamination in the cargo crate.

One way water is detected on other planets or moons is by looking at the light that reflects off of one's surface. By looking at the wavelengths of the reflected light there were indications that hydrogen and oxygen had bonded, meaning either water or hydroxyl.

In actuality the craft that picked up the traces of water, Deep Impact, was the 3rd craft to have detected water/hydroxyl, the first being Chandrayaan-1 and later Cassini. Now that 3 separate crafts have detected water on the moon NASA scientists were sure that there was water.***


Micro

I've begun development of a new game that's being programmed in ActionScript 3.0 (a programming language similar to Java) featuring a little robot that has to save its base from armies of other robots. This may not be an award winning concept, but its proving to be a great learning experience. As of now I've only had a chance to work on it 20 minutes here and there, so I've only written a bit over 500 lines of code for it.



Above is some of the code I wrote for the built in store where the player can buy upgrades, health, and other fun stuff using the currency earned after defeating robots.

As of now the world is not yet ready for my terrible drawing skills, so I'm trying to convince someone else to do the game art, until then the place holder images look like they've been drawn by a three year old.



Footnotes:


*: and I do mean "micro". All of the BW Science Labs employee(s?) can attest to that.
**: I was so excited. Such as shame as I stood freezing outside on August 27th hopefully staring up at the empty night sky.
***: Apparently the first two times they detected it they forgot to email me. Oh yeah, and tell the rest of the country too.