Oct 9 2009
From The Space Library
NASA announced that its LCROSS Mission had successfully created dual impacts on the Moon’s surface, in search of water ice. NASA had launched the LCROSS spacecraft on 18 June 2009 as a companion mission to LRO. The LCROSS craft had traveled 5.6 million miles (9.01 million kilometers) over 113 days. To prepare for the mission finale, the LCROSS satellite had separated from its Centaur upper-stage rocket approximately 54,000 miles (86,905 kilometers) above the Moon on 8 October at 6:50 p.m. (PDT). The Centaur had traveled toward the lunar surface at a speed of 1.5 miles (2.41 kilometers) per second, crashing into the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the Moon’s south pole, shortly after 4:31 a.m. (PDT). Instruments aboard LCROSS had observed the impact for approximately 4 minutes, while traveling through the dust created by Centaur’s crash, before impacting the crater itself at 4:36 a.m. (PDT). NASA reported that other observatories, as well as the amateur astronomy community, had captured images and video of both impacts, commenting that NASA intended to share its data with the LCROSS science team. Jennifer L. Heldmann, ARC coordinator of the LCROSS observation campaign, explained that one of the mission’s goals was to encourage people to view the LCROSS impacts in as many ways as possible. She anticipated that the LCROSS campaign would provide an enormous amount of corroborated information, fascinating to many observers.
NASA, “NASA Spacecraft Impacts Lunar Crater in Search for Water Ice,” news release 09-236, 9 October 2009, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/oct/HQ_09-236_LCROSS.html (accessed 30 September 2011); Seth Borenstein for Associated Press, “Moon Crash: Public Yawns, Scientists Celebrate,” 10 October 2009.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
