 "Photo: MCT")
Although NASA’s much-hyped event of sending two spacecrafts to crash into the moon turned out to be an anti-climatic showing rather than a fantastic spectacle, NASA remains enthusiastic about what the results of the collision could implicate.
On Oct. 8, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), a two-ton empty rocket stage, hit the dark Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole at about 4:31 a.m. PDT, and a second craft crashed four minutes later. Instruments on the following spacecraft, a lunar orbiter and telescopes on Earth acquired data that could soon show whether there was ice on the moon. Despite the fact that the second spacecraft did not capture an image of the impact as hoped, scientists are confident that the explosive hit successfully took place as planned.
Anthony Colaprete, the mission’s chief scientist, remains optimistic about the results of the occurrence.
“We were blown away by the data returned,” he said in a report from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which managed the launch. “The team is working hard on the analysis, and the data appear to be of very high quality.”
NASA invested $79 million in this mission to verify the presence of water on the moon for a number of reasons.
“Eventually, NASA wants to return to the moon and go from there to other planets, like Mars for example,” Tufts Research Associate Professor of Astronomy Robert F. Willson said. “They’d like to establish bases on the moon where people could be for a period of time. And so rather than have to take things like water with them, if they could extract water from the moon, that would help them and the project.”
Tufts Astronomy Professor Kenneth Lang also discussed the potential benefits of water on the moon.
“Water is of interest if you’re going to explore the moon for two reasons,” he said. “One is [that] humans drink water. So humans would need a source of water. The other is you can decompose water to get the hydrogen out of it, and the hydrogen can be used as rocket fuel to move into other parts of the solar system.”
Assistant Professor of Astronomy Danilo Marchesini added that if water was on the moon, it could help to reduce the cost of lunar missions. “If water is already [on the moon], we wouldn’t have to bring the water from the Earth … You always have to remember that anything you send to the moon has a cost proportional to the weight,” she said. “If you don’t have to ship water from the Earth to the moon, it saves a whole lot of money.”
For nearly a decade, scientists have speculated about buried ice below the moon’s poles.
“Comets strike bodies all through the solar system with a decreasing frequency as time goes on. But back when the moon formed, they were hitting the moon all the time,” Lang said. “Comets are just frozen balls of dirty ice ... They’re water ice.”
Elaborating further on the possibility of buried ice, Marchesini explained, “The light day on the moon lasts for about 29 days. During the 29 days, the temperature rises to about 200 degrees [Fahrenheit], so if there was any water it would have evaporated. However, there are craters on the moon — some craters [in which] the bottoms are completely in shadow. In these craters the temperature is able to stay about -400 degrees [Fahrenheit], and in this case the water stays frozen. If water is on the moon, it is in these craters and probably has been there for billions of years.”
During the early morning of the crash, hundreds of space enthusiasts gathered in parkas and sleeping bags to watch the impact on a big outdoor screen at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, while others tuned in to live television coverage. Lang admits that there was some disappointment regarding the lack of a grand explosion.
“A lot of people were waiting to see some explosive debris hurl off the moon when the LCROSS hit it, but that didn’t happen,” he said. “In fact, scientists had hoped, independent of [the] public, that there would be debris because telescopes all over the world, such as Hubble space telescope, were trained to examine the debris to see if there is water in it.”
As for the results of NASA’s mission on the moon, Colaprete said it was too early to say what the plume from the crash contained. But several clues, including the temperature of the flash created by the impact, will help scientists find out in coming weeks.
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