LCROSS - Friday morning's excitement

Friday morning's excitement — blasting a lunar crater with twin 6,000 mile-per-hour impacts — left the LCROSS controller team dead on its feet, says NASA's Grey Hautaluoma. Meanwhile, the science team is frantically looking into observations flowing from telescopes, spacecraft and the LCROSS "shepherd" vehicle, which caught sight of its booster's 7:31 a.m. ET impact crater, before plowing into the Cabeus crater on the moon's South Pole itself, four minutes later.

NASA has selected a final destination for its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) which will impact the crater Cabeus A on 9 October.

LCROSS will search for water ice by sending i

ts spent upper stage Centaur rocket to impact the permanently shadowed polar crater at the lunar south pole, while the satellite will fly through the plume of debris thrown up by the impact to measure its properties. After the first impa

ct, and just four minutes later, the LCROSS satellite will too meet its fate in the crater, while the Moon-orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Earth-based telescopes look on in the search for watery signatures. Shrouded in darkness for billions of years, this is the first time that such pristine material will be exposed to sunlight.

LCROSS Project Site
Visit the NASA Mission Site @ http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

Find out where and how to observe the LCROSS impacts on Oct. 9, 2009:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/impact/index.html

Mauna Kea Observatories LCROSS Impact Webcast
Look in as the greatest telescopes on Earth observe the LCROSS impact.
Friday, Oct 9 at 3:30 AM PDT to 6:45 AM PDT
WMV and Flash: http://dln.nasa.gov/dln/content/webcast/
Quicktime: rtsp://a1884.l1857041883.c18570.g.lq.akamaistream.net/D/1884/18570/v0001/reflector:41883
This webcast will also be archived for later viewing.