Washington – A NASA spacecraft will deliberately crash into the moon in January 2009, helping scientists search for water that might be lurking in deep, dark craters, the space agency announced Monday.
In part, the aim is to help find future landing sites for human exploration of the moon, a goal announced by President Bush in 2004. Earlier lunar missions identified abundant hydrogen in craters near the south pole that are permanently shielded from sunlight, leading to speculation that the hydrogen was bound with oxy gen in the form of water.
If shadowed areas on the moon contain water ice, NASA officials said, they would be prime landing sites for humans. Water can be broken apart to produce hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for fuel and breathing, helping astronauts live off the land while exploring.
The spacecraft – the first to strike the moon since NASA’s Lunar Prospector, in 1999 – will be part of a previously announced mission in which a larger craft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, will fly around the moon to map its surface. Both craft will be launched on the same rocket in October 2008.
The upper stage of the rocket that sends the orbiter to the moon would be used as an impact vehicle. The SUV-size used rocket will slam into a crater at about 5,600 miles per hour, said project manager Daniel Andrews of NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. It should send up a plume of vapor and debris, perhaps 1,000 metric tons of it, rising 30 to 40 miles above the surface.
About 15 minutes later, the trailing “shepherding spacecraft,” loaded with infrared cameras and spectroscopes to determine chemical composition, will fly through the plume, taking and relaying data before itself hitting the moon.