Lots of Ink: That wet plume on the Moon that thrilled NASA
A huge splash of news stories reported late Friday on NASA’s revelation that its disappointingly unspectacular plunge of a booster rocket, followed closely by an instrumented probe, into the moon last month did in fact turn out solid science. Or, more accurately, it showed that solid water is fairly abundant in at least one of the deep and permanently shaded craters near the lunar south pole. There isn’t much room for analysis of these stores, as the news is simple and was predigested for reporters by NASA: We found water, and it’s a bit of a surprise given the initial failure of observers to see the plume of debris.
It turns out, it seems, that much of the impact’s energy threw ejecta sideways across the crater floor. But enough did go high enough for the trailing LCROSS spacecraft to detect water – and for scientists to calculate that about 25 gallons worth of ice got pulverized and tossed into the sky by the experiment.
But so many reporters wrote it up, it is still worth it a few days later to list a bunch of them:
Stories:
- AP- Alicia Chang : Splash! NASA moon strikes found significant water.
- Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: Satellite shows signs of water at moon’s pole ;
- NY Times – Kenneth Chang: Water Found on Moon, Researchers Say ;
- San Jose Mercury News – Lisa Krieger : Water found on moon by NASA’s Ames Research Center ; For Lisa, a local story so she gets in local color – and splashed it, so to speak, across the top of page 1A.
- USA Today – Dan Vergano: NASA: Water found in moon crater ;
- LA Times – John Johnson Jr. : ‘The moon is alive,’ NASA says after water discovery ; Dunno what that hed means. Catchy, though.
- Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: $79m NASA blast finds enough water for man on Moon to have bath ;
- Wired – Alexis Madrigal: Lunar Impactor Finds Clear Evidence of Water Ice on Moon; and no wonder nobody saw it through their binocs. It was clear.
- Telegraph (UK) Rebecca Lefort: Google doodle: water found on the moon by NASA ;
- Space.com – Andrea Thompson: NASA Moon Crash Found “Significant Amount” of Water ;
- NPR – Mark Memmott: NASA Says Crash Turned Up Evidence of Water in Moon Crater ;
- The Nation – Jon Wiener: Water on the Moon – and Money for NASA ; And I don’t think the Nation has ever before been tracked at this site. The story is a departure from the others above too – it’s all about the policy incentives for NASA to have found water up there.
- Scientific American – Paul Sutherland: Space crash confirms water on Moon ;
- Arizona Republic – Anne Ryman: There’s water on the moon, probe reveals ;
- SF Chronicle – David Perlman : Moon strikes found significant water ;
- could do lots more….
Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
