LCROSS to Smash onto the Moon Today
This evening, at 7:30 pm (11:30 UT), LCROSS and its Centaur booster rocket will smack into the deep crater at the south pole of our Moon, hopefully to kick up some debris containing sign of water.
When I wrote about this last month, the target crater was Cabeus A. But on September 29, the team announced that they have shifted the target crater to Cabeus (proper) based on new analysis of available lunar data including observations from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Lunar Prospector (LP), Chandrayaan-1 and JAXA’s Kaguya spacecraft.
There has been tons of information on the web regarding this impact and how we can observe it. There’s no point for me to repeat them here, so I just point you to the site.
- Watch the smashing online at NASA TV
- Science@NASA – LCROSS Viewer’s Guide
- LCROSS_Observation group
- Universe Today
- Spaceweather.com
A computer-generated preview of the impact
