Coolest Moon Mission
I’d have to agree with Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News that Wednesday’s scheduled launch from the Cape on Wednesday, 17 June 2009, will be the beginning of the coolest moon mission ever:
LCROSS may be one of NASA’s most participatory missions. If the spacecraft launches on schedule at 12:51 p.m. Wednesday, it would hit the moon in the early morning hours of Oct. 8. The cloud from the 350 metric tons of debris kicked up by the Centaur booster should spread six miles above the surface of the moon, hitting the sunlight and making it visible to amateur astronomers across North America. The space agency is enlisting telescopes around the country to help monitor the impact.
The 1,664-pound spacecraft will have the best view. LCROSS will separate from the Centaur booster less than 10 hours before impact and will be less than 400 miles above the moon when the spent rocket booster collides at a speed five times faster than a bullet from a .44 Magnum. NASA plans to stream a live view from LCROSS as the Centaur, followed by the spacecraft, plows into the moon.
Over the final four minutes of its existence, as it follows the same terminal trajectory as the Centaur, LCROSS will train its instruments and cameras on the debris cloud, searching it for the chemical signature of water.
Previous spacecraft and ground-based instruments have detected signs of hydrogen near the moon’s poles, and scientists are split over whether that is from ice that could have arrived through the impact of comets or by other means. That ice could have lingered for more than a billion years at the bottom of craters near the lunar poles that have never seen sunlight, where temperatures are more than 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
And despite all the serious scientific talk about hydrogen signatures and lunar regolith, flying a rocket booster into the moon at 5,600 mph to trigger a massive explosion is just flat-out cool.
"We’re certainly going to be making a big splash," Ennico said. "We’re going to see something, but I don’t know what to expect. I know on the night of the impact, I’ll be running on adrenaline."
Found this very good simulation on YouTube:
And here’s the video from Northrop-Grumman…
