Best Make Money

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.

Share

Orbiting satellites report water molecules all over lunar surface.

“Mark, Centaur impact,” called a flight director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, referring to the Centaur rocket that crashed in a crater called Cabeus, where scientists believe ice may have remained frozen for eons.

If there was an explosion on impact, the LCROSS satellite did not immediately show it. But instruments on board sent massive amounts of data in the final minutes before the satellite itself crashed, and remained to be analyzed.

Telescopes on earth watched from afar, and instrument data from them were expected later.

“It’s hard to tell what we saw there,” said a NASA scientist over a television loop. He 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 they can prove it is there in sufficient quantities, it could be a boon to the space agency, which hopes in coming decades to build a lunar base and go on from there to Mars and the rest of the solar system. Such a base would be expensive and troublesome to supply — but frozen water would make a big difference.

Melting the ice for drinking, washing and perhaps growing food in pressurized greenhouses would be the least of it. Water is, of course, H2O — and can be broken down chemically to make hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing.

“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 7:3 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.

“If we find water there, it will change the course of exploration,” said Rusty Hunt of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. “If there’s water near the south pole, we’d go there.” Hunt is a flight director for LCROSS, which was launched from Florida in June. He was the hands-on manager of the mission this morning.

Was Apollo Wrong?

In 1972, the last Apollo astronauts came home from the moon, and that was that. The consensus was that the rocks they had found were dry as dust — even more so, in fact.

But the conventional wisdom has changed.

In 1994, a military space probe called Clementine, sent to map the moon as a way of testing sensors for possible Defense Department use, found evidence of ice in the shadowed corners of craters near the moon’s south pole.

In 1998 a NASA probe called Lunar Prospector was sent to confirm Clementine’s findings, and as it orbited the moon it found evidence of large amounts of ice in the lunar soil.

The working theory is that comets, crashing into the moon over the eons, left tons of ice. In most places, it would have vaporized quickly. But some craters near the moon’s south pole are so deep — and the angle of sunlight is always so shallow — that ice could have remained frozen.