LCROSS Impact on Lunar : NASA Photos show moon strike created plume

LOS ANGELES – NASA's much-hyped mission to hurl a spacecraft into the moon turned out some worthwhile data after all, scientists said.
New images show a mile-high plume of lunar debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency's Centaur rocket struck Oct. 9.
"We were blown away by the data returned," Anthony Colaprete, the mission's chief scientist, said in a report Friday from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which managed the launch. "The team is working hard on the analysis, and the data appear to be of very high quality."
In media coverage before the impact, many observers said they were disappointed at the lack of spectacle.

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Source: news.yahoo.com

Diviner observes LCROSS impact : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/diviner_impacts.html

LUCROSS : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/LCROSS_impact_images.html

A Collision Course to Test for Water on the Moon

More than 230,000 miles from Earth, a NASA spacecraft hit a bull’s-eye on the Moon on Friday morning. Actually, two bull’s-eyes.

At 4:31 a.m. Pacific time (7:31 a.m. Eastern time), one piece of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — LCROSS, for short — slammed into the bottom of a crater at 5,600 miles per hour, excavating about 350 metric tons of the moon and leaving behind a hole about 65 feet wide, 13 feet deep.

Trailing four minutes behind, instruments aboard the second piece analyzed the rising plume and sent its observations back to Earth before it also slammed into the same crater.

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