I'd have to disagree, if they were trying to show aerospace dominance they would have gone with the plan they had 5 years ago where they wanted to send a bunker buster into the crater. Sadly that would have cost a good 500 million dollars.
This project only even came to be because nasa didnt have any delta 2 rockets and the delta 4 rockets they did have had a lot of extra power that could be used.
Haha funny thing is I saw the LCROSS sat just yesterday and got the complete run down of its mission from on of the lead engineers over at Northrop Grumman Space Tech in Redondo Beach. It's actually a 2 part system. (Which is expected to be launched in March, but will crash into the moon some time in July, hopefully the 4th according to my source.) It targets the crater and then detaches one of its rockets that which carries a camera and spectrometer on it. It gets about 4 minutes behind the impacter and then watches the impacter hit and takes data from the cloud, but the cool thing is that it eventually flies into the debris and samples it directly peering from the inside out. All in all its going to be a terrific mission if it works but after talking to the guys that have been building this thing, they have done everything they could to make this successful.
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I'd have to disagree, if they were trying to show aerospace dominance they would have gone with the plan they had 5 years ago where they wanted to send a bunker buster into the crater. Sadly that would have cost a good 500 million dollars. This project only even came to be because nasa didnt have any delta 2 rockets and the delta 4 rockets they did have had a lot of extra power that could be used.
Haha funny thing is I saw the LCROSS sat just yesterday and got the complete run down of its mission from on of the lead engineers over at Northrop Grumman Space Tech in Redondo Beach.
It's actually a 2 part system. (Which is expected to be launched in March, but will crash into the moon some time in July, hopefully the 4th according to my source.)
It targets the crater and then detaches one of its rockets that which carries a camera and spectrometer on it. It gets about 4 minutes behind the impacter and then watches the impacter hit and takes data from the cloud, but the cool thing is that it eventually flies into the debris and samples it directly peering from the inside out.
All in all its going to be a terrific mission if it works but after talking to the guys that have been building this thing, they have done everything they could to make this successful.