The agency's researchers plan to search for water on the moon and they intend to do so through a crash landing. The name of the mission is LCROSS
In 1959, a spacecraft crashed on the surface of the moon near the Sea of Tranquility. The ship itself was destroyed, but the mission was crowned with success. Luna 2 from the Soviet Union became the first man-made object to "land" on the moon. Perhaps unwittingly, Luna 2 created a trend: a deliberate crash on the moon. Dozens of spacecraft have already done so.
The first Kamikazes were Ranger spacecraft built and launched in the early sixties. Five times the car-sized spacecraft crashed on the moon, with cameras ticking all the way down. For the first time, they transmitted to Earth detailed images of the moon's craters, rocks and soil. The data transmitted to Earth was essential to the success of the Apollo missions.
Even after NASA was able to practice soft landings, the crashes continued. In the late 1966s and early 1972s, flight controllers routinely pointed Saturn boosters at the moon to cause tiny earthquakes that would be measured by Apollo seismometers. Crashing was also easier than getting these rockets into orbit. The moon's uneven gravitational field acts on satellites in different ways, and without frequent orbit corrections, satellites orbiting the moon tended to crash on the ground. Although the moon became a convenient graveyard for old ships: all five American Lunar spacecraft (1959-1965), four Soviet spacecraft from Luna (1970-1971) two sub-satellites used in the Apollo mission (1993-1999), the Japanese spacecraft Hiten (XNUMX), NASA's Lunar Prospector (XNUMX) ended their lives in a crash.
All of this experience will now come to the aid of NASA. The agency's researchers plan to search for water on the moon and they intend to do so through a crash landing. The name of the mission is LCROSS, , short for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. Team leader Tony Collapart of NASA's Ames Center Explains how this will work: "We believe that the frozen water hides inside some of the always dark craters that are on the moon. So if we get hit inside one of these craters, we will throw some fragments and we can analyze the material that will fly and look for signs of the existence of water in it.
The experiment becomes more important in view of NASA's intention to return to the moon, and when the researchers get there, they will need water. Water can be split into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathing. It can also be mixed with the moon dust for the production of concrete for construction purposes. Water is also a good shield against Radiation and when thirsty can also drink them. One way is to launch water tankers from Earth. A better idea would be to mine the water directly from the moon.
The journey will begin in 2008 when LCROSS will take off from Earth folded inside the same rocket that will also take off the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a large spacecraft that will carry out its own lunar scanning mission. After the launch the two spacecraft will split up. LRO will head for lunar orbit and LCROSS for crash landing. There will actually be two crashes. LCROSS itself is a dual spacecraft, a smart little mother spacecraft, and a not-so-smart rocket booster. The mother ship is called the "shepherd spacecraft" because it will guide the booster to the moon. The spacecraft will fly to the moon together but will hit it separately.
The accelerator will hit first, and should turn two tons of lunar mass and 10 billion joules of kinetic energy into a blinding flash of heat and light. The researchers expect that as a result of the crash, a crater with a width of about twenty meters will be created and fragments will be thrown up to a height of 40 kilometers. A little behind, the evil spacecraft will film the collision and float through the debris plume. Spectrometers on board will be able to analyze the spectrum of the plume and look for signs of the presence of water (H2O), parts of this molecule (OH), salts, clay, hydrated minerals, and mixed organic molecules. "If there is water there, or something else interesting we will find it." Collapart said. After that, the shepherds' spaceship will also start the death march. Like the old Rangers, it will navigate to the lunar surface while continuously photographing the surface and transmitting the images to Earth. The control personnel will be able to see the crater's emission swelling and filling the entire field of vision, an exciting sight. Until the bitter end, the shepherd's spectrometers will continue to "smell" water. "We can monitor the data stream up to 10 seconds before the impact," Colpart said. "And we should have sufficient control to land within 100 meters of the rocket booster landing site."
The shepherd spacecraft will be lighter, its weight will be only a third of that of the booster, so its damage will be relatively small. However, the shepherd will also create her own crater and plume, which will be added to those of the accelerator. The astronomers hope that the combined plume will be visible from Earth and this will allow observations to continue even after the Shepherd is destroyed. Many readers surely remember the Lunar Prospector crash on the moon in 1999. Mission controllers placed the spacecraft into Shoemaker Crater near the moon's south pole in hopes of splashing water - as LCROSS is supposed to do, but no water was found.
"LCROSS has a better chance of succeeding," Colpert says. First, its impact energy will be 200 times greater than that of the Lunar Prospector, and therefore it will be able to create a deeper crater and throw fragments to a greater height, which will be clearly visible. While the Lunar Prospector plume was only observed through a telescope from Earth, a distance of 360 thousand kilometers, the LCROSS plume will be analyzed by the Shepherd spacecraft from a short distance, using instruments specially designed for this purpose.
Only one question remains open: where LCROSS will crash. "We haven't decided yet," he said. "The best places are the craters near the poles whose bottoms are shaded all year round, and the water reservoirs can survive there in the form of ice to this day. Less trivial sites can be inside canyons, canals and lava tubes. "There are many candidates. A meeting of researchers came in to discuss and rank the variety of sites, and finally choose one of them."
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