NASA photos show plume created by moon strike

(NECN/NASA) – NASA scientists on Sunday released images of a plume of lunar debris thrown up by the impact on October 9 of the agency’s Centaur rocket. NASA’s mission to hurl a spacecraft into the moon created a mile-high plume of lunar debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency’s Centaur rocket struck on October 9. By creating the debris cloud, scientists were able to use the 79-million (m) US dollar Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite to sample and study the dust. The LCROSS itself crashed into the same crater four minutes after the Centaur’s impact, right on schedule, while its companion spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, was flying in lunar orbit 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the site to gather still more data. The crashes created a man-made crater about one-fifth the size of a football field, Brown University geologist and LCROSS scientist Peter Schultz told The AP. Anthony Colaprete, the mission’s chief scientist, said it was too early to say what the plume contained but that several clues, including the temperature of the flash created by the crash, will help scientists find out in coming weeks. Finding significant amounts of water on the moon would be a major discovery, making eventual colonization easier than it would be if settlers had to transport water from Earth. NASA’s lunar impact mission came just weeks after an Indian mission detected the presence of water on the surface of the moon. Water was detected on India’s Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on the lunar satellite Chandrayaan-I, a finding confirmed by US space agency NASA which also had an instrument on board the craft. The Moon Impact Probe (MIP) picked up strong signals of water particles while descending from Chandrayaan-I to moon, said a spokesperson from the Indian Space Research organization (ISRO). Apart from India’s MIP, NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) on board the Chandrayaan-I also confirmed the presence of water. The Indian space agency had abandoned the country’s only satellite orbiting the moon last month after efforts to revive communication with it failed. The launch of Chandrayaan-I in October 2008 put India in an elite club of countries with moon missions. Other countries with similar satellites are the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China. India plans to follow the Chandrayaan, which means “moon craft” in Sanskrit, by landing a rover on the moon in 2011.