SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

You Can Watch NASA Give the Moon a One-Two Punch

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- NASA will throw a one-two punch at the big old moon Friday and the whole world will have ringside seats for the lunar dust-up.

NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon's south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there's any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water--a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon--is hidden below the barren moonscape.

The crashing spaceship was launched in June along with an orbiter that's now mapping the lunar surface. LCROSS--short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross--is on a collision course with the moon, attached to an empty 2.2-ton rocket that helped get the probe off the ground.