Friday, October 9, 2009

In Test of Water on Moon, Craft Hits Bull’s-Eye

" MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — More than 230,000 miles from Earth, aNASA spacecraft hit a bull’s-eye on the Moon on Friday morning. Actually, two bull’s-eyes. But at least the early images failed to show the expected plumes of debris rising out of the impacts. At 4:31 a.m. Pacific time (7:31 a.m. Eastern time), one piece of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — LCROSS, for short — slammed into the bottom of a crater at 5,600 miles per hour, excavating about 350 metric tons of the moon and leaving behind a hole about 65 feet wide, 13 feet deep.

Trailing four minutes behind, a second piece sent its observations back to Earth before it also slammed into the same crater. "

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