Oct 13 1999
From The Space Library
At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, research group leaders from the University of Texas at Austin announced that scientists had sifted through the data from Earth-based observatories and from spacecraft such as the HST, obtained from the controlled crash of NASA's Lunar Prospector into a crater near the south pole of the Moon on 31 July. The researchers reported that they had identified "no observable signature of water" in the Moon's crater. The announcement confirmed the conclusion reached at the time of the crash. The Lunar Prospector spacecraft had launched on 6 January 1998. In March 1998, mission scientists had announced the first tentative findings of the presence of water ice on both of the Moon's poles. The controlled crash, proposed by engineers and astronomers at the University of Texas, was "a low-budget attempt to wring one last bit of productivity from the low-cost" mission. NASA had accepted the proposal because of the successful peer review of the idea, and because the craft's useful life was nearing its end.
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