NASA's intentionally crashed their LCROSS satellite and rocket booster into a dark Moon crater in the wee hours of the morning, hoping to kick up hundreds of tons of lunar material in a six-mile-high dust plume from which they could take detailed spectroscopy readings, looking for traces of water ice. They hoped the flash from the twice-bullet-speed impact would be seen by amateur astronomers on Earth.
But reality hit simultaneously, and there was no dust plume, and no visible flash. The best they got was a fuzzy little dot on infrared:
This is not, however, the first or largest things NASA has hit the Moon with. Back in '71, they smashed Apollo 14's rocket booster into the surface, leaving an impressive 115'-wide crater and generating "moon quake" readings read by seismographs that had been placed on the Moon by the Apollo 12 crew two years earlier:
That image was captured this summer by NASA's new "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter" satellite, or "LRO," currently orbiting the moon and taking snazzy pictures.
I wrote up my impressions of NASA's live broadcast of the impacts, possible results, details on the LRO, and interesting stuff from the glory days of the Apollo and Mercury missions, including the grisly tale of accident-prone astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, survivor of malfunctioning explosive bolts on a Mercury mission, and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 1. Check it out alongside more nifty space race pictures in the full article on the A* forum.
And I owe thanks to Sonia Gee for reminding us of the impending smash on Facebook. Thanks, Sonia!
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