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WAS NASA's moon smash ill-conceived? Weeks before the LCROSS spacecraft smashed into the moon on 9 October, some team members were predicting disappointment. Meanwhile, some critics outside NASA believe the mission will never deliver a useful scientific result.
It was hoped LCROSS would kick up a visible plume of debris that could be studied for traces of water, but a faint image detected last week showed that the impact had thrown unexpectedly little material into the sunlight. This fits with previous experiments hinting that the debris would be ejected in a sideways spray rather than a vertical fountain.
Even if LCROSS does turn out to have detected water, it will not indicate how much of it there is on the surface. "That tells me the fundamental rationale behind the mission was flawed," says Paul Spudis of the Lunar ...
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