鈥淚 THINK we鈥檙e all a little bit disappointed that we didn鈥檛 see anything.鈥� David Morrison, director of NASA鈥檚 Lunar Science Institute, summed up the collective thoughts of everyone who watched NASA crash a rocket into the moon on 9 October.
NASA deliberately crashed its LCROSS spacecraft into the lunar surface about 4 minutes after the rocket. It was looking for water and other molecules as it flew through the debris plume created by the rocket impact.
Earthbound observers failed to see any sign of a plume, as had been hoped. Even the Hubble Space Telescope came up empty. NASA claimed a technical victory, but it will likely be remembered as an anticlimax. It was neither a failure, such as the loss of the Mars Polar Lander in 1999, or a great success, like the spectacular comet collision of the Deep Impact mission in 2005.
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Still, the infrared flash of the impact, which appeared in LCROSS data, may reveal big clues about lunar ice in the coming weeks.