Monday, October 12, 2009

No HSK, but lots of data from lunar collision

The HSK (Horrendous Space Kablooie) is a term I borrowed from Calvin and Hobbes for a major celestial collision. (Calvin suggested it as a much better name for the Big Bang, and he was right.) In this case, the double collision event involving NASA's LCROSS probe and the Centaur upper stage didn't produce the huge visible debris plume NASA expected (and, from a PR point of view, hoped for). But it did produce a mass of data, which will take a couple of weeks to reduce, on the composition of the soil at the bottom of the target crater in the south polar region of the Moon, hopefully including the signature of water ice.

No comments: