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 separated. Then comes the first part of the lunar assault. At 7:31 A.M. EDT, the larger empty rocket will crash into a permanently dark crater and kick up a 6.2 mile high spray of debris. Trailing just behind that rocket is the LCROSS satellite itself, beaming back to Earth live pictures of the impact and the debris plume using color cameras. It 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. “This is going to be pretty cool,” LCROSS project manager Dan Andrews told The Associated Press. “We'll be going right down into it. Seeing the moon come up at you is pretty spectacular.” Within an hour, scientists will know whether water was hiding there or not. The mission is a set-the-stage venture dreamed up by the NASA office that has been working on a $100 billion program to eventually return astronauts to the moon. These are not crashes for the faint of heart. The two ships will smash into the moon at 5,600 mph, more than seven times the speed of sound. The explosion will have the force of 1.5 tons of TNT and throw 772,000 pounds of lunar dirt out of the crater. It will create a new crater – inside an old one – about half the size The Hubble Space Telescope and other larger Earth telescopes will be trained at the moon. Observatories and museums are planning viewing parties in at least three countries. Amateurs need at least a 10-inch telescope to look at the crashes and what they see will only be a small part of their overall view in the scope. And they won't see the impact itself, but the spray of debris flying up.
