By Ron Cowen
The one-two punch of crashing a booster rocket and its mother craft near the moon’s south pole didn’t kick up dramatic and visible plumes as hoped, but scientists reported October 9 that the mission had gathered enough data to tell whether the crater contains frozen water.
At 7:31 a.m. EDT on October 9, an empty rocket booster was deliberately crashed into Cabeus, a shadowed crater near the moon’s south pole where ice is suspected to reside. Astronomers watched through telescopes and the visible-light camera aboard the rocket’s mother ship, NASA’s LCROSS, or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, spacecraft. No plumes were visible. Amateur astronomers using medium-sized backyard telescopes have not reported seeing a plume, which had been predicted to rise above the crater rim and be visible from Earth.
About four minutes after the first crash, LCROSS took its own death plunge into the crater. Even without a visible plume to ooh and aah over, the data recorded by LCROSS as it homed in on Cabeus and flew through the debris from the first impact will still be invaluable for searching for frozen water, said Barbara Cohen of the lunar precursor robotics program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Cohen was one of about 200 astronomers in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, attending the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences and who gathered together to view the LCROSS images on a big screen.