NASA's Lunar LCROSS Mission A Sucess, Scientists Now Analyzing Data

October 9, 2009 3:38 p.m. EST

Moffett Field, CA (AHN) - NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, successfully reached its target, the moon. Early Friday morning LCROSS slammed into the surface creating twin impacts aiding in a search for water ice.

Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the LCROSS mission revealed during a press conference that any number of things could have gone wrong resulting in no data. For instance, the spacecraft could've not hit in the right place; instruments could've not worked. Admittedly scientists across the globe knew the challenges that existed, however everything worked.

Scientists on Earth now are tasked with analyzing the data from the spacecraft's instruments to ascertain whether water is present.

"This is a great day for science and exploration," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The LCROSS data should prove to be an impressive addition to the tremendous leaps in knowledge about the moon that have been achieved in recent weeks. I want to congratulate the LCROSS team for their tremendous achievement in development of this low cost spacecraft and for their perseverance through a number of difficult technical and operational challenges."?

Views and technical observation detailed that the highly tauted visible plume of debris that NASA had predicted to rise miles above the lunar surface was not visible on images sent from the LCROSS probe or ground-based telescopes.

However, scientists were unable to hide their exuberance at the priceless continuous flow of information and valuable data, including intriguing "blips" in spectroscopic analysis of the vapors produced by impact.

According to NASA the satellite which was part of a controversial mission traveled 5.6 million miles during a historic 113-day mission. Researchers say that its final destination was the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the moon's south pole.

"The LCROSS science instruments worked exceedingly well and returned a wealth of data that will greatly improve our understanding of our closest celestial neighbor," said Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The team is excited to dive into data."

In preparation for impact, LCROSS and its spent Centaur upper stage rocket separated about 54,000 miles above the surface of the moon on Thursday at approximately 6:50 p.m. PDT.

Traveling at a speed of more than 1.5 miles per second, the Centaur hit the lunar surface shortly after 4:31 a.m. Oct. 9, creating an impact that instruments aboard LCROSS observed for approximately four minutes. LCROSS then impacted the surface at approximately 4:36 a.m.

The LCROSS team expects it to take several weeks of analysis before it can make a definitive assessment of the presence or absence of water.