nasa moon bombing

nasa moon bombing

What has come to be known as the NASA Moon bombing is scheduled to take place in the early morning hours on Friday, October 9th, 2009. The idea is to impact a projectile into one of the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar South Pole to eject a stream of dust and other material which will hopefully include water vapor. The NASA Moon bombing will be accomplished by the Lunar Crater Observation Sensing Satellite or LCROSS for short, now currently flying with a Centaur rocket stage. LCROSS was launched earlier this year along with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, now orbiting the Moon.

Late tonight the Centaur and the LCROSS will separate, At about 7:30 AM Eastern Time, the Centaur will plow into the Cabeus Crater at a steep angle, kicking up a pillar of dust and other material. This event and the subsequent plume will be observed by nine scientific instruments on board the LCROSS before it too crashes into Cabeus. Astronomers, both professional and amateur, will be able to observe the plume created by the crashes with Earth based telescopes. The Hubble telescope and other space based observatories will also attempt to observe the NASA Moon bombing. The NASA Channel will begin a live broadcast of the NASA Moon bombing at 6:30 AM Eastern time on Friday. Various cable news networks will break in closer to the NASA Moon bombing time.

Scientists have suspected for a long time that permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles contain ice, deposited over billions of years of comet strikes. Results from remote sensing and previous space probe crashes, such as Japan's Kaguya probe, Europe's Smart-1 and NASA's Lunar Prospector, have proven tantalizing but inconclusive. Excitement about water on the Moon spiked a few weeks ago when it was confirmed that the Indian Lunar probe, the Chandrayaan-1 detected water molecules in lunar topsoil. The existence of water on the Moon would help to facilitate future lunar settlers, who would mine the water rather than have to transport it from Earth.