LCROSS finds water
I wrote a little about the LCROSS mission that was designed to search for water in the moon and the singing PM. While I’ve still not started composing songs about my projects, the preliminary results have been announced by NASA and there was water in plume, quite a lot of water and more than was expected.
The LCROSS launched a large projectile into a crater at the South pole of the moon that’s been in permanent shadow for billions of years. A second satellite following the first by four minutes analysed the dust plume for water. It’s a very simple experiment and was extremely successful.
The results indicate there may be considerable water, far more than was thought, in the form of ice crystals in areas that never see the sun.
Clearly this would make any manned mission to the moon easier as the crews would potentially not have to re-supplied with water or oxygen, as both could be extracted locally.
Next step is identifying where the water came from, there has been considerable speculation that it’s from comet impacts over the last couple of billion years and could contain some clues about the origin of the universe.
A very positive result for NASA and to celebrate they got their own Googledoodle
LCROSS Google doodle