NASA's moon blast lands with a thud. NASA's highly touted crash landing on the moon may have been a dud for viewers, but scientists said Friday it will help them gather a wealth of information. NBC's Tom Costello reports.
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(Lunar explosion yields no naked-eye results. A NASA mission to intentionally crash a spacecraft into the moon goes off as planned but yields no immediate visible debris.)
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(Keith Olbermann of "Countdown" explains NASA's most recent mission. A purposeful collision with the Moon.)
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No big flash from NASA’s moon crash
A pair of NASA spacecraft smashed into the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, as part of a mission aimed at blasting up signs of water ice.
Pictures of the impact zone were beamed back live to Earth, but the video imagery did not show any signs of a flash.
"It's hard to tell what we saw there," said Michael Bicay, director of science at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
The first crash took place at 7:31 a.m. ET. That’s when an empty rocket that weighed 2.2 tons hit the crater Cabeus. It was expected to create a minicrater about 66 feet (20 meters) wide, which is half the length of an Olympic pool. The blast should have kicked up a plume of lunar debris about six miles (10 kilometers) high.
Scientists hoped an analysis of the debris would confirm the theory that water — a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon — is hidden below the barren moonscape.
Trailing behind the rocket was the lunar probe LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft sent Earth live pictures of the expected impact zone.
Visible-light images showed little sign of the debris plume, but Bicay noted that thermal imagery did pick up evidence of a crash.
Just four minutes after the rocket stage hits the moon, the LCROSS spacecraft completed its own fatal plunge. Data sent back before LCROSS' crash will be analyzed for signs of water ice.
Telescopes around the world — including the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope — aimed their cameras at the big event to provide more views of the dust-up.
LCROSS and its bigger rocket stage launched together last June and only separated Thursday night, the last major milestone before the big crash.
The lunar demolition derby was broadcast live on NASA television. Museums and observatories planned early-morning events to show the crashes, which can be seen with backyard telescopes in the predawn darkness west of the Mississippi River.
The LCROSS probe cost $79 million and was an add-on to a bigger NASA satellite now circling the moon.
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Sources: NASA, MSNBC, Guardian.co.uk, Google Maps
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