by William Harwood
In a brute-force search for ice on the moon, an empty 5,000-pound rocket
stage traveling twice as fast as a rifle bullet crashed into a
permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole Friday,
presumably blasting out tons of debris for examination by an
instrumented probe that carried out its own kamikaze plunge four minutes
later.
While the initial impact at 4:31 a.m. PDT did not prove especially
dramatic--it was not even visible in real-time video from the Lunar
Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS)--scientists said a
camera sensitive to temperature variations clearly recorded the flash of
the Centaur rocket's catastrophic crash.
Three successively zoomed-in views showing the impact of a Centaur
rocket stage in a dark crater on the moon as viewed by NASA's LCROSS
probe minutes before its own destruction.
(Credit: NASA
More important, spectroscopic data indicated the presence of material of
some sort above or near the impact point in a murky crater known as
Cabeus, and instruments aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
observed the Centaur crater and confirmed a plume of debris. But it was
not immediately clear how extensive the plume was or how much material
was blasted out.
Principal investigator Anthony Colaprete said it would take several days
to analyze the data from the $79 million LCROSS experiment and reach a
consensus on whether or not water ice was, or was not, detected.
"Life is full of surprises, we want to be careful and not make a false
negative or a false positive claim," he told reporters after the impact.
"I'm excited we saw variations in the spectra because that means we saw
something, and it was not just blackness. The information's there, we
just need to get to it."
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