Spacecraft Makes A Splash On The Moon

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

And I'm Renee Montagne.

This morning NASA deliberately crashed two unmanned spacecraft into the lunar surface at over 5,000 miles per hour. The goal was to create a huge cloud of debris and then to study it to search for signs of water.

NASA got the data it needed, but the live footage sent back from one of the spacecraft wasn't as exciting as had been hoped. NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce is here to tell us what she saw.

Good morning.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Good morning.

MONTAGNE: Remind us first, before we get to the visuals, of why NASA was not knocking a hole in the moon in the first place.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, NASA thinks that water in the form of ice might be hiding in cold, dark lunar craters, ones that never see the sun; they're in permanent shadow. So what they did was, they hit a crater at the moon's south pole to kick up stuff from the bottom so that NASA could analyze it. The mission was called the LCROSS Mission, for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.

MONTAGNE: And you, as we said, you watched the collision. How did you see it?

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, I watched it online. I watched the NASA webcast of footage that was sent from one of the spacecraft. It was following a large rocket part and that rocket part hit the moon and threw up dust and the spacecraft flew threw it.

MONTAGNE: And what did the collision look like in the end?

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, on the live broadcast, on the NASA Web site, it did not look all that dramatic, to tell the truth. You just saw gray craters getting closer and closer and closer, but then it just sort of stopped. There was no flash of an impact when the rocket part hit. There was no big cloud of dust. The screen just sort of went blank.

But at a press conference that's actually going on right now, NASA scientists said that all the observing spacecraft's instruments worked very well and they actually got the data they needed to say if water is there.

They showed some still pictures, like an image of the impact flash from a thermal camera that measures temperature. That looked sort of like a little white spec in the photo. They also showed a little blip in an image that they said was the crater they made with the rocket part.

But still, they said they got enough data to say if water is there, but it's going to take them a little while to go through all of the information and make a statement on that.

MONTAGNE: And besides you, Nell, telescopes around the world were watching.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's right. They were watching to see the cloud of debris come up over the rim of the crater, and that information is starting to come back now.

MONTAGNE: You know, let's (unintelligible) thing about this mission. Why do we care if there's water on the moon?

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, you know, NASA says it could be used by future explorers, but you know, they also just want to understand the moon. It's our close neighbor. And you know, we're learning new things about it all the time.

MONTAGNE: You know, there's one thing that people have expressed, apparently, I gather, to NASA, which is that there's a fair number of people out there who are worried that this impact might hurt the moon, you know, I don't know, making jokingly hitting the man in the moon in the face.

But is that - is there any issue here?

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yeah, there have been headlines, you know, NASA's bombing the moon and things like that. People love the moon. But you know, the moon gets hit by meteorites all the time. It has no atmosphere, so it's constantly getting pummeled by things from space. And you know, it's just a regular day for the moon.

MONTAGNE: And our Web site will be updated throughout the day as the new images come in, and thank you, NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce, for bringing us up to date at this moment.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.