NASA's LCROSS Moon Impact Mission Provides Great Data

Several sources are sending us reports of NASA's recent LCROSS Moon impact mission. While the visual results seem to be less than stunning, LCROSS Principal Investigator Anthony Colaprete said the initial results produced "the data we need," but refused to say anything about "water or no water." "The goal of this dual impact was to have the Centaur upper stage impact first, allowing the LCROSS spacecraft to observe close-up the results of the impact. In fairness, the view from LCROSS as it approached the moon was amazing — even though there was no obvious visual evidence of impact, which early data from the infrared camera on the craft indicates did occur. What happens next is a whole lot of math and science. The LCROSS spacecraft included nine individual science instruments. This suite of instruments consisted of one visible camera, two near-infrared cameras, two mid-infrared cameras, a visible light spectrometer, two near-infrared spectrometers, and a photometer. All nine of those instruments were gathering data simultaneously and streaming that data back to Earth."

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Participating in Science

[k6mfw]

Yes it is boring but that's science, not science fiction (ya ever noticed that all space sci-fi shows are either alien space monsters or laser beam battles? Like there's only seven plots to a western.) They probably shouldn't have hyped the huge explosive plume in animations for weeks before impact. However, public was given direct observation of this program in action. OK maybe they didn't feed all the console data direct but they gave realtime visuals. However, realtime astronomy is really boring to those that don't understand it. Gathering at Ames Research Center grass area of Shenandoah Plaza was interesting. How often can someone camp out at a federal facility?