Friday, October 16th, 2009

Moon in Review

Cabeus, the crater targeted by the LCROSS mission. NASA/JPL image.

Last week, NASA crashed an old rocket booster and the LCROSS probe into the surface of the moon in search of water. Though he view from Earth was disappointing to many amateur astronomers, LCROSS officials said that they had obtained useful data from the experiment and were working to analyze it now. The lunar impact came just weeks after two other teams reported finding their own clues to the presence of water in the lunar soil, in the presence of hydroxyl signatures visible in parts of chemical spectra obtained from lunar observations. In this segment, we'll get a wrapup on the hunt for water on the moon and talk about what confirming the presence of water might mean for moon exploration attempts.

Guests

Paul Spudis
Senior Staff Scientist
Lunar and Planetary Institute
Blog: "Once and Future Moon" (Smithsonian's Air and Space magazine)
Houston, Texas

Related Links

Segment produced by:Annette Heist

Image: These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.
Credits: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.