Some of you readers of The Tracker were up all or most of the night to watch the video feeds of NASA’s moon-excavating, water-seeking non-warhead missile collision with a lunar south pole crater so dark and cold that any water that froze there in the last few billion years is probably still there. Or was, till the LCROSS mission smacked it with its spent Centaur rocket.

I was not awake. But I found right off, arising as usual before dawn in California, a dandy summary of things at Sky & Telescope Magazine. Staffer Alan MacRobert had a cloudy sky so he watched on TV. “What drama…!” he exclaims of the buildup, with freeze-frame images showing the probe’s eye view as it plunged toward the crater and the plume of stuff raised by the Centaur rocket’s excavation of a new crater in an old crater named Cabeus.

And from the shadows of that target crater rose…”nothing – though the probe was looking straight down into it. The seconds ticked off. Still nothing but darkness.” Perhaps the infrared showed something but as cosmic fireworks go this was purely a spectacle for the scientists with the fancy hardware. One hopes they hit a glacier down there. He’s updating the post through the day – his original stuff is toward the bottom. First word from the press conference: no verification of a plume. Yet.

Later today there will be more, after a NASA news conference. In days and weeks to come data analysis will follow. One has to assume there WAS a plume there.

Here are some of the dispatches from some of the early rising, fast-typing members of the fourth estate who took it in live:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: NASA probes give moon a double smack ; This is the hed put on it at the Albuquerque Journal. The hed AP with which AP sent it is better: NASA makes as-yet unseen hit on moon with probes. Borenstein teases the lunatic few who object to assaulting our heavenly companion orb – with what some call a “bomb”  – by starting his story with a pugnacious lede: “Take that, moon!” As for the public waiting to see more than fuzz and static on video screens, he writes, is “seemed puzzled.” The jerky images fed to the world appear to have missed the moment of impact. Crap. Perhaps the rivers of data stored on NASA’s memory banks will include time zero. And maybe a ground based telescope or two got pics of something visibly rising from the deep polar crater.
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: In Test of Water on Moon, Craft Hits Bull’s-Eye ; Chang watched with the public from California at  NASA’s Ames Research Center south of SF, north of San Jose, the LCROSS mission’s parent lab. His piece is about the science to come. This early version doesn’t mention that, so far, reports are scarce of anybody seeing anything with their own eyeballs – with or without the aid of a video feed.
• San Jose Mercury News – Mike Swift : NASA Ames LCROSS spacecraft collides with moon;
• AAAS Findings (blog) Richard A. Kerr: LCROSS Impact: Boom or Bust? His lede: “I didn’t see anything. Did you?” He talks to a well-established authority on asteroid and meteor impact cratering, who tells him that calculating how high and wide and thick a plume ought to be raised by plunging a spent rocket at 5000 mph+ into unknown lunar regolith is very tough. Kerr’s last line: “one can hope.”
• LA Times – John Johnson Jr.: NASA craft smacks the moon in quest for water/The crash may have beenanticlimactic for observers expecting fireworks, but scientists said a signature from the dust plume was detected; He too went up to Ames Research Center to join hundreds of people gathering for a communal video feed on the lawn. His background description on the science and uncertainty is solid and optimistic.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: NASA probe strikes moon’s south pole in search of water ; He leads with the science and hopes for data, closes with a quote that includes the word “anticlimactic.”
• SF Chronicle: NASA’s moon blast called a smashing success ; After intro grafs averring that it did hit and for good reasons comes “But cameras aboard the spacecraft did not see the brilling plume” some expected. One guess, he reports: It his solid bedrock rather than the mix of sand and smaller rocks” expected. Or, one thinks, a solid rock-hard GLACIER, Yeh!  I’m for glaciers, on the Earth or Moon. Or Mars.
• Scientific American – George Musser: LCROSS strikes Earth’s moon.., .Blogs it from the Division of Planetary Sciences mtg in Puerto Rico. The pros didn’t see any more than the average schmo. Nice, inside look at scientists as spectators on science.

And one that declared it a victory for capitalism:

• Wall St. Journal Market Watch – Christopher Hinton: NASA hits the Moon with help of private industry / Northrop develops $79 million spacecraft to help government find lunar water ; The Tracker too is a great fan of private enterprise as the engine of innovation and prosperity, but can’t quite figure this piece out. It says LCROSS comes as “the nation’s space agency looks more toward private business for its equipment and support services.” Well duh, and huh? NASA does not have government factories for manufacturing its Delta, Atlas, and other launchers. Those, and the shuttles, are from contractors and always have been. The spacecraft that have gone to other planets were essentially all made by business teams, often winners of competitive bids. The cameras and computers and radio transmitters and thrusters on and  inside them are made – to general gov’t specs – by private manufacturers large and small. They are tended by the contractor personnel that throng many NASA research centers and always have. These hard-working and skilled people do merit more credit than they usually get while NASA and its scientists and the administrators who hire them hog the press conferences, so salutations to Mr. Hinton on that score. (One might add that the term “NASA scientists” often is applied to thousands of university professors and their post-docs and grad students working under NASA contract, an academic angle seldom reflected explicitly in news coverage). But if LCROSS with its Northrop Grumman tool marks all over it is a sign of anything new or different in how NASA works, it eludes me and is not explained in this story.

Maybe later today, or Monday, we’ll catch up on stories stemming from a press conference this morning and other indicators of data and results.

*UPDATE:  AP‘s Seth Borenstein redid his dispatch numerous times as events transpired. Here is the latest, written with Alicia Chang (and which went on AP’s partner Canadian Press): Did the moon move for you? It did for scientists, but the public left cold by lack of action. He lets NASA explain away the disappointment as product of a public expecting too much – and then delivers an earful from various sources lambasting the space agency for overselling the event in the first place.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Ames LCROSS site ;

Plus, in light of the last bullet above, re the WSJournal: Northrop Grumman LCROSS site ; Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 11:33 am and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.