Posts : 570 Join date : 2009-10-07 Age : 27 Location : Australia
Subject: Water on the Moon Confirmed by NASA Crashes Sun Nov 15, 2009 10:12 am
In October, NASA crashed a two-ton rocket and the SUV-size LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) into the permanently shadowed crater Cabeus on the moon's south pole.
The crashes were part of an effort to kick up evidence of water on the moon
Despite disappointing many amateur astronomers on Earth, who had been expecting to see a giant plume of lunar dust and ice crystals, the moon-water mission was a success, NASA says.
The LCROSS team took the known near-infrared light signature of water and compared it to the impact spectra LCROSS near-infrared recorded after the probe had sent its spent rocket crashing into the moon.
A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining which wavelengths of light they emit or absorb.
"We got good fits" for the data graphs, said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS's principal investigator, at Friday's press conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
"We could not put other compounds [in] and generate the same fit."
Sun Nov 15, 2009 10:12 am
