Another Blogging Blog

Now that the dust has settled, both metaphorically and literally, the scientists at NASA have managed to take a careful look at the masses of data gathered by the LCROSS mission to the moon and are already reporting great success¹.

Lunar craters ²

The mission went according to plan, crashing a spent rocket booster into a crater of the moon on the 9th of October, while instruments aboard the shepherding spacecraft viewed the event and the resulting plume of ejected material.

This “bombing” of the moon, as some media sources liked to call it, was eagerly anticipated by the inhabitants of Earth, who were expecting to see something spectacular. Nothing about this kind of science is guaranteed and the enormous spray of gas, dust and debris did not materialise, much to the disappointment of those watching through telescopes, or at the live images broadcast on TV and over the Internet.

The reports that came out over the following hours and days sounded like a collective “blah” as the public turned its back on space science with a dismissive wave of the hand. Many journalists, talking heads and commentators, unimpressed with the lack of “fireworks”, questioned the value of such interplanetary ventures. Science doesn’t always give instant gratification and those criticisms were premature. After a careful examination of the data, some preliminary results are now in, and they are far more interesting than any puff of gas.

The cloud of debris kicked up by the rocket impact actually reached several kilometres above the lunar surface, exposing long frozen material from within the permanently shadowed depths of the target crater. Spectrometers aboard LCROSS recorded the presence of the constituent elements in the ejected material, as they were lit up by the sun for the first time in a few billion years. From these data, NASA scientists have already concluded that there were “significant” quantities of water ice present there.

The availability of water on the moon would be a big asset for future colonies there, providing not only drinking water but also oxygen to breathe and fuel to power the habitat. These lunar deep freezers may also contain other interesting elements which might hold clues to the formation of our solar system. Again, the scientific methods requires a little more patience from us, while the data from this valuable and intellectually profitable mission continue to be analysed.

References:
1) LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon
2) Image courtesy of NASA (far side of the moon photographed from Apollo 11 in lunar orbit).