By Ron Cowen
The Centaur rocket that was deliberately crashed into one of the moon’s southern craters October 9 did in fact kick up a plume, even though the plume was not initially as large as hoped.
The relatively low velocity of the Centaur rocket generated a plume that was difficult to spot — in fact impossible to see by many ground-based telescopes — and smaller than had been predicted, suggests Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
Moments after the impact, as the rocket’s mother spacecraft LCROSS got closer and closer to the crash site of its empty Centaur rocket, which had plunged into a crater called Cabeus, the raw images taken by LCROSS showed nothing but darkness.