In the pre-dawn hours Friday, a spacecraft is scheduled to punch a 13-foot-deep hole in a crater at the moon’s south pole that hasn’t seen sunlight in billions of years. The purpose: to find whether ice is hidden there.
NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which set out for the moon in June, made a late course correction Tuesday to position itself to steer a rocket into the 2-mile-deep crater Cabeus at 5:30 MDT Friday morning.
Four minutes later, if all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will fly through the cloud of debris that will rise above the lunar surface and linger there for less than a minute. As it passes through the cloud, the satellite’s nine instruments will analyze the dust and debris for evidence of water before crashing itself.
“The spacecraft is looking great. I don’t think we could miss the moon now if we tried,” said Steve Hixson, vice president of Advanced Concepts at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, Calif., which built the craft.
“It’s our job to confirm there is water there,” said Dan Andrews, the project manager at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which designed the spacecraft’s instruments. “But even if it’s very dry, that’s a good answer to have.”
Water on the moon would be as valuable as gold. Not only would it be useful to drink, should President Barack Obama continue President George W. Bush’s ambitious plan to build a lunar base there after 2020, but it could be broken down to make breathable air and even rocket fuel.
Transporting water to the moon, on the other hand, costs $50,000 a pound.
According to NASA, the rocket will be traveling at about 5,600 mph when it plunges into Cabeus. That will create a dust cloud rising up to 6 miles above the lunar surface, providing a rare show for amateur astronomers. The collision can theoretically be seen throughout the Southwest, providing the observer has a large enough telescope and good viewing conditions.
Star party
