lunar_prospector_000614 WASHINGTON -- Late last July, an odd-looking spacecraft called Lunar Prospector took one final spin around the moon and then slammed kamikaze-like into a crater at the lunar south pole with the force of a car hitting a brick wall.
It was no mistake.
Watch the video animation of the Lunar Prospector's crash.
The $63 million probe that had surveyed the moon for 18 months was intentionally sent on a suicide plunge. The idea was to see if Prospector could kick up enough material to prove beyond a doubt that the moon's dark craters contain ice.
Though astronomers watched at more than 20 observatories around Earth and with the Hubble Space Telescope, none saw so much as a puff of dust kicked up by the spacecraft's crash.
But as far as Prospector's chief scientist Alan Binder is concerned, the mystery of water on the moon is far from over.
"We really won't know until we get down there and dig," said Binder, director of the nonprofit Lunar Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
| The Lunar Prospector |
| VIDEO: As part of the ongoing tests to ensure the Lunar Prospector was space-worthy, the spacecraft was 'virtually' crashed into the moon. Watchthe video animation of the crash . |
Lunar Prospector Legacy Still Unfolding: The probe crashed intoa crater, supposedly filled with ice, in an attempt to kick up a dust cloud that could be analyzed by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and about two dozen ground-based observatories for signs of water. Want to Learn More? |
He will offer a firsthand account of the mission Wednesday at the National Air and Space Museum in the Smithsonian's final
Exploring Space Lecture Series 2000. SPACE.com sponsors the series.Prospector, in fact, found tantalizing evidence of water by detecting large amounts of hydrogen at the moon's poles. Hydrogen is one of two elements in water. The other is oxygen, which is plentiful in the moon's gray soil.
"We were always very careful to say we were looking for hydrogen," Binder said. "We map hydrogen, we infer water. We do feel it's highly likely [the moon has water]. I'm not a betting man but I'd put a lot of money on the fact that there's water there."
And there could be vast quantities of it -- as much as 200 million tons of ice crystals buried 18 inches (45 centimeters) or so beneath the moon's dusty surface.
Thawed, that would be enough to fill a lake about 2 to 3 miles (3 to 5 kilometers) wide by 32 feet (10 meters) deep.
The existence of water on the moon would be more than just a scientific curiosity. Water could be crucial to future humans hoping to explore the moon. Broken down chemically into hydrogen and oxygen, water could provide fuel for rockets or electrical generators, along with breathable air.
Launched on January 6, 1998, Prospector was the first of NASA's Discovery class of "faster, better, cheaper" missions. It was to orbit the moon around its poles, giving scientists a fresh look at the lunar surface. By contrast, the Apollo lunar missions had sent astronauts to areas near the moon's equator.
We wont know for sure whether there's water on the moon "until we get down there and dig," says Alan Binder.
Aboard Prospector were five science instruments to provide a global, high-resolution map of the moon from just 60 miles (96 kilometers) above the surface. One of those instruments, a neutron spectrometer, could "sniff" out traces of hydrogen in the moon's permanently shadowed poles.
Scientists now are using the spacecraft's data to make lunar maps showing the surface distribution of 10 elements, including iron, titanium and aluminum. All are resources that could be mined for use by lunar colonists or possibly brought to Earth. Begun last fall, the mapping project should take about two years.
Prospector's last chore was to crash itself into a crater on the moon's south pole on July 31, 1999. The spacecraft hit the lunar surface at 1,100 miles per hour (1,775 kilometers per hour).
"It cost so little and the data was better by a factor of 10 over what we thought it would be," Binder said. "Not only did it surpass our greatest expectations, but had I proposed to NASA the science we would get they'd have said, 'He's nuts.'"
NASA has no more plans to send spacecraft to the moon, although a handful of commercial companies are interested in launching their own probes to transmit lunar images for entertainment purposes. Japan plans to launch a probe in 2003 to map the moon.
There are plenty of moon mysteries to go around for all, said Binder, who worked for nearly 12 years designing and operating the Prospector mission.
"Every single thing about the moon is a mystery," he said. "We've just barely begun lunar science. Geologists have been doing the Earth for 200 years and there's literally thousands of them looking at it. It's ludicrous to think with a handful of probes and a few people who walked on the moon that we would have found all the answers.
"We've got many decades of intense study still to go."
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