MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., (Reuters) – Two U.S. spacecraft were crashed into a lunar crater yesterday but scientists said it was too early to say whether the mission to search for supplies of water on the Moon had been a success.
NASA, which is hoping to find sufficient quantities of water to use as fuel for space exploration, said it could take two months to make a conclusive assessment of what was found.
A two-ton empty rocket stage slammed into the eternally dark Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole at 4:31 a.m. PDT (1131 GMT), intended to throw up a plume of spray from any ice that was there.
Instruments on a second craft, that flew through the plume and hit close to the same spot four minutes later, as well as a lunar orbiter and telescopes on Earth captured data that could show whether there was ice there.
Video transmitted back from the trailing craft did not show, as hoped, the eruption of debris, but infrared devices showed a hot flash that indicated a crater about 18 to 20 yards (meters) wide.
“We didn’t see a big splashy plume like we wanted to see,” said Michael Bicay, director of science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center.
Scientists did not know whether there had been no plume or if it could not be seen in the Internet-quality video shown as the craft crashed.
