NASA celebrates Nobel Peace Prize by Impacting on Moon
9 Oct 2009, dilip Comments:
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LCROSS and its Centaur rocket stage hit near
the lunar south pole in a search for water ice.
US
president Barack Obama Gets Nobel Peace Prize and within few hours NASA celebrates it by Impacting on the moon. The Impact was successful
and post Impact conference is about to be held.
The countdown for
the mission has finally ended and NASA declared the mission to be successful.
NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin impacts on the moon's surface
early Friday in a search for water ice. Scientists will analyze data from the spacecraft's instruments to assess whether water ice is present.
The satellite traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic 113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus crater, a
permanently shadowed region near the moon's south pole. The spacecraft was launched June 18 as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"The LCROSS science instruments worked exceedingly well and returned a wealth of data that will greatly improve our
understanding of our closest celestial neighbor," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist at NASA's Ames
Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
"The team is excited to dive into data." In preparation for impact, LCROSS and its spent Centaur upper stage
rocket separated about 54,000 miles above the surface of the moon on Thursday at approximately 6:50 p.m. PDT(Indian TIme:06:50 AM). Moving at a
speed of more than 1.5 miles per second, the Centaur hit the lunar surface shortly after 4:31 a.m.(Indian TIme:PM) Oct. 9, creating an impact that
instruments aboard LCROSS observed for approximately four minutes. LCROSS then impacted the surface at approximately 4:36 a.m.(Indian timpe 4:36
PM)
The Time line of the Impact
Power-up of LCROSS Payload
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:12:01 PM GMT+0530The mission operations team has initiated power-up of the LCROSS science payload and is evaluating the health of the spacecraft instruments. Spacecraft data being transmitted to LCROSS mission control at NASA Ames at 1.5 Mbps via the Goldstone Deep Space Network Facility in California. Spacecraft and science instrument data are relayed in real-time.
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:02:58 PM GMT+0530
Centaur Impact into Cabeus.
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:04:55 PM GMT+0530
LCROSS impact into Cabeus.
