What's the Worst That Could Happen?
WASHINGTON — 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.
Thursday evening, about 10 hours before smashing into the moon, LCROSS and its empty rocket will separate.
Gee; wonder what could be buried under the icy-rock surface, besides ice and rock?
JK; that's Sugarman from the X-Men storyline Age of Apocalypse. I hope they find something cool...and hopefully not hibernating.
Comments