Nasa Moon bombing: LCROSS mission crashes into Moon

The Nasa LCROSS mission to discover how much water is on the Moon has crashed into the surface, blasting a plume of rock and dust into space.

It is hoped that the readings taken will confirm the presence of enough water necessary to supply future visits by astronauts Photo: Universal News & Sport

NASA's LCROSS spacecraft and its booster rocket will both target the Cabeus crater Photo: NASA

Millions watched live online as at 12:31pm British time an empty rocket plunged into the Moon's south pole at 1.6 miles per second. A probe followed close behind, flying through the six-mile-high shower of debris kicked up by the impact, before crashing into the surface itself four minutes later.
Telescopes on Earth and instruments on the probe itself scoured the huge impact cloud to see if there is any water or ice spraying up.
It is hoped that the readings taken will confirm the presence of enough water necessary to supply future visits by astronauts.
Within an hour scientists claim they will be able 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 sensors will scour for ice, fly through the debris cloud and then just four minutes later take the fatal plunge itself, triggering a dust storm one-third the size of the first hit.
The impact site is a 60-mile-wide hole, which lies just a short distance from the Shackleton crater – the proposed location for Nasa's manned lunar base, which it hopes to have completed by 2024.
Discovering a potential water supply has obvious benefits for that scheme, not least providing astronauts with a potential reservoir that they can tap into rather than rely on shipments from Earth.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Indian Chandrayaan satellite appeared to confirm the existence of water in the region – subsequently confirmed by data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the vessel that LCROSS hitched a ride into space alongside.
British researchers helped Nasa pick the spot for the collision.
The Cabeus south polar region was identified by the University of Durham team as a site with high concentrations of hydrogen - a key component of water.
It is believed water ice could lie at the bottom of dark craters at the Moon's poles, where temperatures are lower than minus 170C.
Dr Vincent Eke, from the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham, said: "Water ice could be stable for billions of years on the Moon provided that it is cold enough.
"If ice is present in the permanently shaded lunar craters of the Moon then it could potentially provide a water source for the eventual establishment of a manned base on the Moon.
"Such a base could be used as a platform for exploration into the further reaches of our Solar System."
The energy generated by the rocket hitting the Moon will be equivalent to exploding about two tonnes of TNT, he said.
He added: "While this sounds dramatic, the impact of this will simply create one more dimple on the moonscape.
"The cratered surface of the Moon shows it has a history of violent collisions with asteroids and comets."
Dr Eke led a study of data from Nasa's 1998 Lunar Prospector mission which showed that hydrogen was concentrated in permanently shaded craters at the Moon's polar regions.
If the hydrogen really is a sign of ice, it implies that the craters could hold a total of 200,000 million litres of water.

Last month new findings from three spacecraft, including India's Chandrayaan-1 probe, showed that small amounts of water might be chemically bound up with the Moon's soil.