Happy Crashings
Usually when a probe crash-lands, it’s a disaster. Not in the case of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). In April 2006 it was announced the probe would send the Centaur module to crash and tunnel into the crater-laden landscape. The impact of the crash will throw debris 40 miles (60km) up from the surface for the still-orbiting section of the probe to analyze for signs of water.
Should these efforts prove successful in locating the ice researchers believe is hiding deep in the shadows, it will set the stage for locating the Moon base that NASA hopes to construct, in part, as a refueling station for future manned missions to Mars.
Built upon the work of the Navy’s Clementine probe and the Lunar Prospector in the 1990s that discovered a very small amount of apparent snow in deep lunar craters in the southern polar area. Supporting this admittedly spotty evidence was abundant hydrogen detected in the Polar Regions. LCROSS is to be launched in October 2008 with the main event occurring in January of 2009.
This mission to “land” a NASA craft on the moon was proposed by the Ames Research Institute (ARI) to answer questions about the viability of the Constellation Program. Should no water be found anywhere on The Moon, it will become a less attractive target than Mars, perhaps not even warranting a stop-over on a manned mission to the red planet.
After the sampling mission, the Shepherding Spacecraft (SSC) portion of LCROSS still in orbit will begin imaging possible sites for a yet unscheduled mission to The Moon, culminating in a manned landing in 2020. It is hoped there will be enough ice present to be turned into oxygen for life support and rocket fuel. This wouldn’t make a moon base exactly self-sufficient, but would go a long way in making lunar colonization less costly, negating the largest materials constraint on such a mission.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 2:30 am and is filed under Mission Objectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
