Project MOON EXPLOSION Blows More Than Water Out Of Lunar Craters

 

NASA's most awesome mission since pointing at the sky and saying "I bet we can put people there" has come to fruition, with absolute proof that there's water ice on the Moon - and lots of it.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is the most explosive euphemism since Tom Clancy discovered the thesaurus.  It 'sensed' the contents of the lunar crater Cabeus by dropping an entire Centaur rocket booster into it, and when you 'drop' something in orbit it's very much like 'fired at' by the time it hits the ground.  The booster slammed into the shadowed regolith like a two ton bullet, blowing a twenty meter hole in the moon and ejecting dust tens of kilometers into space - where the LCROSS satellite, chasing the Centaur, could get a good look at it for four minutes before its own suicide strike into the same crater.

 

NASA's most awesome mission since pointing at the sky and saying "I bet we can put people there" has come to fruition, with absolute proof that there's water ice on the Moon - and lots of it.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is the most explosive euphemism since Tom Clancy discovered the thesaurus.  It 'sensed' the contents of the lunar crater Cabeus by dropping an entire Centaur rocket booster into it, and when you 'drop' something in orbit it's very much like 'fired at' by the time it hits the ground.  The booster slammed into the shadowed regolith like a two ton bullet, blowing a twenty meter hole in the moon and ejecting dust tens of kilometers into space - where the LCROSS satellite, chasing the Centaur, could get a good look at it for four minutes before its own suicide strike into the same crater.

Both impacts were observed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the one part of the mission not designed to explode part of a astronomical body that day.  Spectrographic analysis unequivocally confirmed the presence of water, and that it made up a whole percent of the ejected material, so when we do build bases in the moon there'll be plenty of this all-important liquid for the taking.  Even more interestingly, there were organic compounds as well as an unexpected amount of mercury, so in true science tradition we've spawned two more questions in answering one.

The permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles seem to act as frozen traps for material moving through the solar system, collecting meteors where nothing will disturb them - until some awesome apes from another world blow them to bits.  And then those apes get to work out what happened, and why, and what we're going to do when we get there!

Luke McKinney

Lunar impact tosses up water and stranger stuff

LCROSS NASA site

Both impacts were observed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the one part of the mission not designed to explode part of a astronomical body that day.  Spectrographic analysis unequivocally confirmed the presence of water, and that it made up a whole percent of the ejected material, so when we do build bases in the moon there'll be plenty of this all-important liquid for the taking.  Even more interestingly, there were organic compounds as well as an unexpected amount of mercury, so in true science tradition we've spawned two more questions in answering one.

The permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles seem to act as frozen traps for material moving through the solar system, collecting meteors where nothing will disturb them - until some awesome apes from another world blow them to bits.  And then those apes get to work out what happened, and why, and what we're going to do when we get there!

Luke McKinney

Lunar impact tosses up water and stranger stuff

LCROSS NASA site

Comments

[disappointed]

Luke your writing stinks. Like the site, hate your writing.

[Barrie O'Leary]

Luke, your writing is great. Fresh and exciting. I suspect you would wish your reader to adopt the inquisitive nature of a young child. Works for me. Oh, organics. I wonder. Hg, too. Nope.
Might be, though.

[Charles Longway]

Luke,
Knowing that water is on the moon begs the next qeustion, is their microbial life in the water bearing regions? Our mindset is to send a robotic craft to drill a hole with expensive equipment. Perhaps we need to bomb the moon again and look for RNA in the same way that NASA looked for water. If RNA can be detected it would be a very quick and perhaps less expensive alternative to find out about life. I really should be their, even if only transplanted from earth.
---Charles

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

Charles -

RNA on the Moon ? One element at a time, my friend.

I think that just finding good old garden variety water is a great 1st step, since it'll be one less thing we have to export from Earth when we finally establish a presence on the Moon.
Of course, if we found micro - organisms or their by - products at the Lunar impact sites, it would be interesting.