Here's a single piece of news that somehow makes two older pieces of news maybe not so bad after all. So it turns out, that as NASA's LCROSS moon bomb was dropping to the lunar surface, it was Twittering back to Earth in the voice of the unexpected whale from Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy. So that should be some sort of consolation for Adams fans who were disappointed at the new, unwanted Hitchhiker's book as well as astronomy fans who thought that there wasn't anything exciting in the LCROSS crash.

From The Guardian, via Topless Robot:

In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa's LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon's surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams's much-loved story.

Published 30 years ago, the classic novel features two missiles, aimed at Zaphod Beeblebrox's spaceship the Heart of Gold, turned into a whale and a bowl of petunias by the vessel's Improbability Drive (at an Improbability Factor of 8,767,128 against). The whale spends the last few minutes of its life pondering its existence - "Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?" - before it crashes into the surface of the planet Magrathea.

As Nasa's LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale's words: "And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round ... it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! ... That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me?"

Then it crashed into the moon, unfortunately failing to produce the 10km plume of dust and rock which could have been scanned for evidence of frozen water. Nasa made no mention of Adams's bowl of petunias, which thought only "Oh no, not again" as it tumbled towards Magrathea.

Well done, NASA.