Mooner

NASA is so good at blowing up space shuttles and crash landing spacecraft their next mission seemed like a no-brainer.

Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice. Or a really cool explosion. The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA's history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations. Like the Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo mission disasters.

NASA's previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the moon's poles before crashing itself into a crater at the lunar South Pole. Now the much larger Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, set for a February 2009 moon crash, will take aim and discover whether some of that hydrogen is locked away in the form of frozen water.

LCROSS will piggyback on an October mission, but will take three months to reach proper moon smashing position. A smaller spacecraft will guide the vehicle towards its target crater, before dropping back to watch - and later fly through - the plume of moon dust and debris kicked up by it's impact. The shepherding vehicle is packed with a light photometer, a visible light camera and four infrared cameras to study the lunar plume before it turns itself into a second impactor and strikes a different crater about four minutes later.

Figuring out the final destinations for the $79 million LCROSS mission is "like trying to drive to San Francisco and not knowing where it is on the map," NASA officials said. Not only is that an expensive trip, but a hell of a rental car to total. Scientists want the impactor spacecraft to hit smooth, flat areas away from large rocks, which would ideally allow the impact plume to rise up out of the crater shadows into sunlight. That in turn lets LRO and Earth-based telescopes see the results.

LCROSS researchers anticipate a more than a 90% chance that the impactors will find some form of hydrogen at the poles. The off-chance exists that the impactors will hit a newer crater that lacks water - yet scientists can learn about the distribution of hydrogen either way. Good cover for just wanting to crash really expensive shit.