NASA to crash probes on moon in water hunt

By Tariq Malik

updated 7:18 p.m. ET April 10, 2006

NASA’s next mission to the moon will not merely orbit the gray satellite, but crash two vehicles into its South Pole to hunt for water ice, the space agency said Monday.

In addition to mapping the moon to support future astronaut missions, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spaceflight will also aim a spent fuel stage and impactor probe at a southern crater rich in hydrogen and, possibly, ice.

“I think aggressively touching the moon is an understatement,” said Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, in a Monday press conference. “What this mission buys is an early attempt to know what some of the resources we’re going to have ... we know for sure that for human exploration to  succeed we’re going to have to essentially live off the land.”

Astronomers know that hydrogen exists in some form on the permanently-shadowed crater floors along the Moon’s polar regions from past lunar orbiters. The Pentagon’s Clementine spacecraft hinted at water ice in a crater called Shackleton in 1994, while NASA’s Lunar Prospector unmistakable signs of hydrogen on the Moon’s surface.

NASA hopes its LRO and crash missions will provide solid answers on the presence water ice on the moon, and whether it exists in forms that may prove useful for future astronauts. Under the space agency’s exploration vision, a four-astronaut moon mission is slated for no later than 2020.

Lunar smash-up
Set to launch with LRO in October 2008, the $73 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is a bare-bones spacecraft designed to use cameras and spectrometers to watch its 4,409-pound (2,000-kilogram) upper stage slam into hydrogen-rich Shackleton Crater, mission managers said.

“It’s got the mass of an SUV and we’ll send it into the South Pole of the moon,” LCROSS project manager Daniel Andrews, of NASA’s Ames Research Center, said of the upper stage. “We will create a substantial plume [and] excavate some sample material, some of which we think will be water ice.”

The 1,940-pound (880-kilogram) LCROSS probe will fly through the resulting plume and use its instruments to scan for water while taking photographs, then — 15 minutes after the upper stage booster’s impact — the “shepherding” satellite will also crash into the crater floor, Andrews said.

“We know that we can steer it sufficiently to sample another region of the crater,” Andrews said, adding that smashing into the same place twice would likely not yield additional valuable data.

A network of ground-based observatories will observe the impact and plume from Earth while LRO, India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter and other spacecraft examine the moon crash from their respective locations, LCROSS mission managers said.

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