Posts
NASA's LCROSS mission went plunging into a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole this morning -- an empty rocket stage, followed four minutes later by a small satellite to see if the rocket kicked up ice in the lunar soil.NASA's rocket crash did not produce the expected image of debris flying.
Did it find any? NASA could not, at least for now, say.
"We're not going to make any claims about water, no water, whatever," said NASA's Jennifer Heldmann, who coordinated data from more than a dozen of the world's most powerful telescopes, watching as the impact happened a quarter of a million miles away. There was one image, from the LCROSS satellite tracking the crashing rocket, showing a white flash at the impact point. But it was just a few pixels across, and so far, scientists said they did not have images of the plume of debris they had expected.
"Life is full of surprises," said Anthony Colaprete, the mission's principal investigator, at a news conference this morning. "We have to look at a lot of data." The scientists said they had reams of data to comb through, and pictures might not tell the story. Spectrometers -- instruments that detect the chemical composition of distant objects -- may be more useful after analysis. The process, said scientists, may take months.
One scientist conceded it is possible the rocket missed any pockets of ice that might be in the crater -- or that the theory could be wrong, and there are not large amounts of ice in the soil after all. The space agency sent LCROSS (short for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) to look for ice in the lunar soil -- which NASA hopes may be helpful to future astonauts trying to live long-term on the moon.
"If we could live off the land, using this water -- if we discover it -- that would be a great benefit," said Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "That would mean we don't have to bring it with us."
Impact came shortly after 7:30 a.m. ET on Friday, and indications were that instruments watching the crash were working properly. They included spectrometers, instruments that measure the chemical composition of the plume kicked up by the crashing rocket.
Useful data also was expected from the LCROSS satellite, flying a few hundred miles behind its Centaur booster. The satellite had four minutes to transmit its findings before it, too, hit the surface.
Impact came shortly after 7:30 a.m. ET on Friday, and indications were that instruments watching the crash were working properly. They included spectrometers, instruments that measure the chemical composition of the plume kicked up by the crashing rocket.
Useful data also was expected from the LCROSS satellite, flying a few hundred miles behind its Centaur booster. The satellite had four minutes to transmit its findings before it, too, hit the surface.
