Posted on 10/19/2009 8:02:33 PM PDT by ETL
There was a plume after all. Observers on Earth had their doubts after LCROSS and its Centaur booster rocket hit the Moon on Friday, Oct. 9th. The twin lunar impacts failed to produce visible plumes of debris, prompting speculation that something had gone wrong. On the contrary, members of the LCROSS science team are now calling the experiment "a smashing success."
Fifteen seconds after the Centaur hit the shadowy floor of crater Cabeus, the LCROSS spacecraft flying 600 km overhead took the following picture of a plume measuring 6 to 8 km wide:
"There is a clear indication of a plume of vapor and fine debris," says LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete of NASA/Ames. "The ejecta brightness appears to be at the low end of our predictions and this may be a clue to the properties of the material the Centaur hit."
Nine cameras and spectrometers on LCROSS captured every phase of the Centaur's impact: the intial flash, the debris plume, and the creation of the Centaur's crater. "We are blown away by the data returned," says Colaprete. "The team is working hard on the analysis and the data appear to be of very high quality."
But did the impact reveal any water at the bottom of Cabeus? The LCROSS team isn't ready to say yet. Combining their data with those of other observatories and analyzing the full dataset could take weeks. According to NASA, "any new information will undergo the normal scientific review process and will be released as soon as it is available."
For more information, read NASA's Oct. 16th press release and browse the gallery of images.
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WOW! My favorite show when I was, well, pretty young at the time. 10 am Saturday morning, “supermarianation”.
Sounds like an excellent idea to me. Make sure his two side kicks, err....handlers are on board as well.
This is probably a stupid question, but if there is water on the moon does that mean there could be life too?
That’s actually a good question. Here’s an article I found which addresses the possibility:
Microbial Life on the Moon?
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/11/05/microbial-life-on-the-moon/
Water? They know from prior experience about water.
This was about the ability to target an astroid. Target practice.
Hardly. The motion of the moon relative to earth is nowhere as fast as a rogue asteroid. Not even close. However, we’ve already both landed on an asteroid and crashed into a comet. Also shot down a failed satellite or two.
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