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.
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