WASHINGTON — After gearing up for NASA’s much-hyped mission to hurl two spacecraft into the moon, the public turned away from the sky Friday anything but dazzled. Photos and video of the impact showed little more than a fuzzy white flash.
Many people were disappointed at the lack of spectacle. One person joked that someone hit the pause button in Mission Control. Yet scientists involved in the project were downright gleeful.
There were no pictures of spewing plumes of lunar dust that could contain water, but, they say, there was something more important: chemical signatures in light waves. That is the real bonanza, not pictures of geyser-like eruptions of debris, the scientists said.
Scientists said the public expected too much. The public groused as if NASA delivered too little. The divide was as big as a crater.
The main goal of the NASA mission was to look for some form of water on the moon — something that could still turn up in those light-wave chemical signatures.
A preliminary review of data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicated no signs of water in the debris viewed from the blast, NASA said late Friday, but it added that more study was needed.
