Lunar washout

摘要

Was Nasa's moon smash ill-conceived? Weeks before the LCROSS spacecraft smashed into the moon on 9 October, some team members were predicting disappointment. Meanwhile, some critics outside NASA believe the mission will never deliver a useful scientific result. It was hoped LCROSS would kid up a visible plume of debris that could be studied for traces of water, but a faint image detected last week showed that the impact had thrown unexpectedly little material into the sunlight. This fits with previous experiments hinting that the debris would be ejected in a sideways spray rather than a vertical fountain.