Anyone expecting something interesting from the LCROSS probe?

[T J]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_CRater_Observation_and_Sensing_Satellite

I can't wait to see what this thing kicks up. Water on the Moon would make the moon the perfect stepping stone for the rest of the solar system.

 

[T'Girl]

Hope springs eternal. I accessed the area using google earth (google moon), looks wicked. In fact both poles of the moon have cracters that appear different than the rest of the moon, more pronounced. I wonder why.

 

[T J]

Only one person cares...? I am in a forum mainly about space, aren't I?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Hope springs eternal. I accessed the area using google earth (google moon), looks wicked. In fact both poles of the moon have cracters that appear different than the rest of the moon, more pronounced. I wonder why.

As the Sun is always low in the sky at the Moon's poles (its axial tilt relative to the plane of the Earth's orbit is small), the long shadows are always going to make features there seem more pronounced. My guess fwiw...

 

[Mark de Vries]

I think so too. Still, that means they're always in shade (or parts of the craters are at least), so who knows if water once froze there and hung around.

 

[T'Girl]

As the Sun is always low in the sky at the Moon's poles ...

... the long shadows ...

If a comet struck the moon, the moon would temporarily have an "atmosphere", those gases that settled into dark craters would freeze in place.

 

[T J]

So it looks like it was not as visually interesting as we might have hoped. Here's hoping we get good data and find loads of water!

 

[John Picard]

It will be very interesting if we learn that the Moon is filled with caramel nougat.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

It will be very interesting if we learn that the Moon is filled with caramel nougat.

I'm still hoping for cheese.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

So it looks like it was not as visually interesting as we might have hoped. Here's hoping we get good data and find loads of water!

I suspect many thought there would be a nuclear class explosion, but it was just an expended Centaur impacting. Granted there was hella kinetic energy, but no atmosphere for a shock wave or to keep the particulates suspended for longer than the gravity could pull them back down.

 

[TheMasterOfOrion]

This is what happens when you cut budgets and do cheaper missions, you get less scientific results and more hot air press releases


http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/yb/136283809

WASHINGTON _ NASA smashed an SUV-sized probe into the surface of the moon Friday morning, hoping to discover a trove of ice hidden beneath the moon's south pole.

But the 6,000-mile-an-hour collision _ followed four minutes later by a probe carrying cameras and sensors to pick up traces of water vapor _ failed to kick up the expected miles-wide cloud of lunar dust and ice crystals.

Instead, it hit with a splat.

"Remarkably unremarkable," was the verdict of Dave Richardson, 33, a Navy engineer who brought his 6-year-old son to watch the live broadcast of the collision on a three-story-tall video screen at the Newseum in downtown Washington.

There was palpable disappointment among the crowd of 300 _ which included NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden _ that came to the Newseum in hopes of witnessing a space-age spectacle. The sense of anticlimax was felt by space junkies everywhere, who tuned into morning TV news shows or logged onto the Internet to watch the 7:31 a.m. EDT collision.

Hours after the impact _ which showed up on the video screen as a fuzzy white flash _ NASA scientists said they were at a loss to explain why the expected plume of debris didn't materialize. Still, they weren't prepared to write off the experiment as a failure.

"You don't know how these things are going to go," said Anthony Colaprete, the project scientist for the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite and principal investigator at Ames Research Center. "We saw a crater and we saw a flash, and something had to happen in between."

A day before, he had cautioned that results would not be immediate. "It will take at least a couple of days for the team to see what it got in the data and a couple of weeks to (discern) the amount of hydrogen-bearing compounds," Colaprete said.

The aim of the $79 million mission is to see whether ice exists in shadowed craters at the moon's poles. To do that, NASA sent two probes: an empty rocket hull intended to smash into the surface and kick up a cloud of dust, and a second to collect data from the plume before meeting its own demise.

The hope was that sunlight would vaporize water ice hidden in the dirt cloud once the plume rose out of the shadows and above the rim of the Cabeus crater, which is believed to have the "highest hydrogen concentrations at the (lunar) south pole," according to NASA. Hydrogen often indicates the presence of water.

The researchers had expected the force of the collision would create a crater 66 feet wide and 13 feet deep and blast about 350 metric tons of lunar dust into the air. They had hoped that amateur telescopes as small as 10 to 12 inches could see the blast.

NASA scientists could not explain why a plume was not visible. They speculated that the debris could have blown sideways _ instead of upward, which would have been easier to see _ or that the lunar soil was too compressed to kick up much dust.

But Colaprete emphasized that the second probe's light-spectrum sensors worked fine and that analyzing the measurements should enable astronomers to determine whether there's water at or below the lunar surface. "We have the information, we just need to go back now and really sift through it," Colaprete said.

NASA itself trained several of its own "eyes" on the mission, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite circling the moon that was launched with LCROSS from Cape Canaveral on June 18 aboard an Atlas V rocket.

The LCROSS is the latest in a series of moon missions that the global scientific community has undertaken recently, including the Chandrayaan-1 probe from India, which has built a strong case for the presence of water on the moon's surface.

"We're probing the moon to give up her deepest and darkest secrets," said NASA chief lunar scientist Michael Wargo

 

[doublegood]

I was sorely disappointed that the moon was not knocked out of its orbit, doomed to wander the cosmos forever.

 

[Brent]

This administration needs to provide more funding to NASA, period.