On 09 October 2009, shortly after 4:31 am Pacific time (12:31 BST), a 2366 kilogram booster rocket named LCROSS crashed into a shadowed crater near the moon's south pole. The high speed collision was part of an experiment to determine if there is water on the moon - but contrary to expectations there was curiously little to see!
As hundreds of telescopes and observers watched, a NASA mission to search for water on the moon has achieved its grand finale with a pair of high-speed crashes into the lunar surface according to the article in New Scientist.
At the Ames Research Center near Palo Alto, California, scientists and engineers with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) peered in silent concentration as successive images of the crater Cabeus grew larger on their screens. there was no telltale flash to be seen from the expected collision of a 2366-kilogram booster rocket into the permanently shadowed crater, located near the moon's south pole.
"I think we're all a little bit disappointed that we didn't see anything," David Morrison, director of NASA's Lunar Science Institute, told New Scientist. "But 90 per cent of the data has not yet been seen."
