NASA plans moon crash

The
Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA's history shows that such
missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations.

"I
think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude,
but it's very economical," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator
for the mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

NASA's
previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the
moon's poles before crashing itself into a crater at the lunar South Pole. Now
the much larger Lunar
Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, set for a
February 2009 moon crash, will take aim and discover whether some of that
hydrogen is locked away in the form of frozen water.

LCROSS will
piggyback on the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission for an Oct. 28 launch atop an Atlas 5
rocket equipped with a Centaur upper stage. While the launch will ferry LRO to
the moon in about four days, LCROSS is in for a three-month journey to reach
its proper moon smashing position. Once within range, the Centaur upper stage
doubles as the main 4,400 pound (2,000 kg) impactor spacecraft for LCROSS.

The smaller
Shepherding Sp