NASA Moon Bomb

NASA “Bombs” the Moon: The Adventures of LCROSS - "NASA Moon Bomb"

Hours before the LCROSS spacecraft was set to slam into the Moon, an official at NASA Ames Research Center in California received a panicked phone call from a very concerned citizen.

When the vehicle crashed into the Moon, would it set off a chain reaction that could destroy Earth? the caller asked.

No, the official said reassuringly.

Can I call you tomorrow to find out for sure?

You can try, he answered, but if the world ends, I’m not going to be here to answer your phone call.

That was probably the strangest reaction to the “bombing” of the Moon that NASA did in October 2009. The task of LCROSS – the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite – was to look for evidence of water on the Moon. To achieve that goal, NASA engineers had to get creative.

LCROSS was a secondary payload to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The two spacecraft were launched aboard an Atlas 5 rocket on June 18, 2009, and sent toward the Moon by the Centaur upper stage. While LRO separated and went into orbit on its own, LCROSS stayed attached to the Centaur rocket.

NASA Moon Bomb LCROSS Centaur

Artists conception of the LCROSS Centaur "NASA Moon Bomb"

The Centaur executed a fly-by of the Moon on June 23 and then entered an elongated Earth orbit. Over the months that followed, controllers carefully tweaked the vehicle’s orbit to send it on a direct collision course with the Cabeus crater at the Moon’s south pole, a shadowed area deemed likely to contain ice.

The big day was in the early morning hours of Oct. 9. NASA Ames opened its large lawn the night before for people to view the event on a large inflatable screen. Hundreds of people camped out all night, watching space movies such as “The Dish” and buying Moon Pies from vendors in a very festive celebration of space exploration.

Tensions mounted as the hours rolled by. LCROSS separated from the Centaur and followed behind it as both raced toward collisions with the Moon. At 4:31 a.m. PDT, the Centaur upper stage slammed into the surface. LCROSS recorded the collision, flew through the debris cloud, and hit the Moon five minutes later. Both impacts were also observed by LRO and Earth-based observatories.

NASA Moon Bomb Impact

 

Images of the impact flash created by LCROSS Centaur "NASA Moon Bomb"

 

While controllers cheered, the crowd on the NASA Ames lawn was puzzled. They had seen no plume on the video that LCROSS sent back of the Centaur collision. NASA’s bombing of the Moon was a bit of a bust, at least to those who stayed up all night.

Scientists who analyzed the data were far from disappointed. Not only had LCROSS captured the impact, but the plume of materials that were ejected demonstrated conclusively that the Moon had an abundance of water in its shadowed craters. The dual collisions had lifted grains of mostly pure water ice that had not seen sunlight in billions of years. The LCROSS results would help to revolutionize our understanding of the Moon and make settlement much easier.

For their efforts, the LCROSS team at NASA Ames and contractor Northrop Grumman received the Popular Mechanics magazine's 2010 Breakthrough Award for innovation in science and technology. And since they didn’t destroy the Moon or Earth in the process, they were around to receive it.

Links for LCROSS - "NASA Moon Bomb"

LCROSS mission page

LCROSS Facebook page

 

 

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