Boom or bust? This near-infrared image of Cabeus crater was taken from Palomar Observatory after the LCROSS impact today.
Credit: Palomar Observatory/Caltech
Posted on 10/11/2009 12:32:25 PM PDT by neverdem
Boom or bust? This near-infrared image of Cabeus crater was taken from Palomar Observatory after the LCROSS impact today.
Credit: Palomar Observatory/Caltech
NASA officials and scientists spent the better part of an hour in this morning's press conference patting themselves on the back. The LCROSS mission in search of lunar water was a great success, they said, all the while ignoring a very large elephant in the room: No one among the millions watching as a 2-ton hunk of metal slammed into the moon could see the much-ballyhooed spray of dust and debris that they had been told to look for.
Even LCROSS scientists have seen nothing of a debris plume. "I'm not necessarily surprised," said LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. In exploration, "you just never know how these things are going to go. We just have to go back with a finer-tooth comb." Colaprete's dogged optimism is grounded in enticing spectroscopic changes detected around the impact site. Determining whether it was water will take weeks or months of data combing.
Actually, Colaprete had warned his colleagues, at least, about the possibility of a no-show debris plume. "It's a very unproven and highly unpredictable science, impact cratering," he told an audience at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last March. Impact modelers working for the team had struggled to simulate the impact of a cylindrical--not a simpler spherical--object, and one that was hollow, not solid, like the LCROSS impactor. Plus, it smashed into a surface of unknown shape and composition. LCROSS was "the most challenging impact modeling I've ever done," said Erik Asphaug of the University of California, Santa Cruz. There were just too many unknowns for him to be entirely comfortable with his results; impact on the odd unseen boulder, for example, could have sent most of the debris into the crater wall instead of into the sky.
LCROSS scientists may yet extract a debris plume from the data, but "the spectra is where the information is" about any water, Colaprete said, referring to spectral colors in the visible, infrared, and even ultraviolet returned by the trailing LCROSS spacecraft and by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Some of these showed intriguing blips from the impact flash and the still-warm crater. There were also spectral changes above the impact site between pre- and postimpact. "What do these little blips mean? I don't know," Colaprete said. "I'm just glad they're there. We're going to work on this feverishly." Even so, no public word about water will be forthcoming before the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union, he said.
Start rooting now for the blips.
This story first appeared on Science's news blog, Findings. You can find our full coverage of the LCROSS mission, including multimedia, here. A Facebook Q&A with author Richard Kerr can be found here.
The science data in the end is what matters.
It did not help for the media to use phrases like “Bomb the moon” and such.
This is exploration, you cannot be sure what to expect.
The video of the Black guy being ignored when he tried to high 5 some people was hilarious.
If the Moon were hollow, would there even be a plume outside as the object pentrates the to the inside? ... LOL
Exactly. The media hype is what NASA is downlaying.
Once you get below the layer of mold wouldn’t the impacter just lodge itself into the soft, cheesy layer and stay there?
A small atomic warhead on the ‘impactor’ might have helped a bit.
That’s depending on whether it hit a solid section of cheese, or one of those Swiss caverns that are so famous.
Either way, the impacter would still lodge somewhere in there. Right now it looks as if it may lodge somewhere in NASA’s nether regions.
This may become a real pain in the...
;->
Ah what the hell. Who needed those millions more than NASA’s fireworks department.
This reminds me of Obama jobs forecast upon jamming through of the Stimulus taxpayer theft bill.
I don’t what device they would use to analyze the plume, but that’s the viewscreen that should have been broadcast at impact Maybe have a split-screen that would show the spectrometer and the visual.
Also...why wasn’t a camera mounted into the nose of the impactor? Nasa got pics from one of the Ranger surveyors that impacted on the moon long ago.
Back in 89? They also promised live feed of Voyager as it visited Neptune? That was interesting for about 10 minutes. More for the marvel of a continuous feed from that distance.
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That's a pretty big deal.
Does cheese plume?
LLS
Reminds me of the first moon landing.
NASA spent a ton of money designing special feet for the lunar vehicle legs to sit on, expecting several feet of accumulated dust. Since the universe is billions of years old they thought it natural to have a massive amount of dust.
In reality, there was a couple of inches of dust. Maybe this is another case of expecting dust and getting bupkis.
There was a thread yesterday which featured ten minutes of highspeed filming of bullets hitting various substances, filmed at one million frames per second. Most of the bullets that penetrated and exited the other side of the target sucked the impact detritus with it in a shockwave, rather than making a plume back the way the buttle came from. Impacts that did not exit the other side made spalling plumes.
Lunar bupkis found on moon, say NASA scientists.
“We found bupkis!”.
I didn’t think green cheese would give off much of a debris plume when impacted. :-)
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