WHEN it comes to finding water ice on the moon, two eyes are better than one. Alas, the first attempt to search for icy caches using two spacecraft at the same time has failed, and the death of one of them means there will be no second chance any time soon.
If the moon鈥檚 poles hold water ice, orbiting spacecraft could spot it by bouncing radio waves off an upper layer of rock and ice. Catching the reflections with a second orbiter would produce a particularly clear signal, because ice reflections look very different from rock when viewed from an angle rather than by just one orbiter directly above.
That鈥檚 why researchers moved India鈥檚 Chandrayaan-1 and NASA鈥檚 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to within a few dozen kilometres of each other on 20 August. Programming problems on the US aboard Chandrayaan-1 prevented the device from sending a radio pulse. Later analysis showed the signal would not have reached its target anyway because Chandrayaan-1鈥檚 attitude was drifting more rapidly than anticipated.
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Contact with Chandrayaan-1 was lost on 28 August, and just a day later the mission was declared over.