WASHINGTON - NASA smacked two spacecraft into the lunar south pole Friday morning in a search for hidden ice. But the big live public splash people anticipated didn't quite happen.
Instruments confirm that a large empty rocket hull barreled into the moon at 7:31 a.m. (1131 GMT), followed four minutes later by a probe with cameras taking pictures of the first crash.
Screens got fuzz and no immediate pictures of the crash or the six-mile plume of lunar dust that the mission was all about. The public, which followed the crashes on the Internet and at observatories, seemed puzzled.
NASA officials touted loads of data from the probe and telescopes around the world and in orbit. But most of the photos they showed during a Friday morning press conference were from before the crash. The crash photos and videos were few and showed little more than a fuzzy white flash.
Still, NASA scientists were happy.
"This is so cool," said Jennifer Heldmann, co-ordinator for NASA's observation campaign. "We're thrilled."
"This is going to change the way we look at the moon," NASA chief lunar scientist Michael Wargo said at the news conference.
Expectations by the public for live plume video were probably too high and based on pre-crash animations, some of which were not by NASA, project manager Dan Andrews told The Associated Press Friday morning 80 minutes after impact.
Another issue, one NASA thought was a good possibility going into Friday, was that the lighting was bad and work needs to be done on images to make them easier to see, Andrews said. Experts said the images could be essentially "grey against black," he said.
"What matters for us is: What is the nature of the stuff that was kicked up going in?" Andrews said. "All nine instruments were working fine and we received good data."
Andrews said the science team is pouring through the information - including what are supposed to be good images from ground-based telescopes on Earth - to answer the big question: Is there some form of water under the moon's surface that was dislodged? It will probably be two weeks before scientists will be certain about the answer, he said.
Before the crash, mission scientists said there was a chance that if it was really moist under the crater, they'd know about water within an hour. That's not the case now, Andrews said.
People who got up before dawn to look for the crash at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory exchanged confused looks.
Telescope demonstrator Jim Mahon called the celestial show "anticlimactic."
"I was hoping we'd see a flash or a flare," Mahon said.
The first and much bigger crash was supposed to hit with the force of 1.5 tons of TNT into crater Cabeus and create a mini-crater about half the size of an Olympic pool. The second crash was to be about one-third as strong.
The idea is to confirm the theory that water - a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon - is hidden below the barren moonscape.
The images were to come from the probe itself. The probe is LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross. It had five cameras and four other pieces of equipment to look for ice or any form of water as it dove through the dust storm created by the empty hull.
-
Science Writer Alicia Chang contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
-
On the Net:
NASA's LCROSS site: http://www.nasa.gov/lcross
