Nasa's lunar crash landing fails to raise moon dust

  • The Guardian,
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Footage from the LCROSS spacecraft in the minutes before hitting the moon

Nasa's hope of filming a spectacular crash on the moon was dashed satellite and telescope imagery failed to record the enormous plume of rock and dust that scientists had predicted.

The US space agency steered two parts of a spacecraft, called LCROSS, into the moon at more than 5,600 miles per hour, in the final act of a hunt for signs of water.

Nasa scientists had anticipated that the impact would throw up a six-mile-high cloud of lunar dust and rock which could be scanned for evidence of frozen water. But after the collision at 12.31pm today, no sign of the plume was spotted, even from the second stage, which crashed nearby four minutes later.

Nasa's headquarters in Washington DC had faced a flood of calls from people objecting to the agency "bombing" the moon, fearing disruption to tides on Earth and even their menstrual cycles.

Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator on the LCROSS mission, said of the missing plume: "We haven't been able to see it clearly in our data yet." He added that scientists were working "feverishly" on information sent back.

The spacecraft ploughed into a 60-mile-wide crater called Cabeus, which is permanently in shade at the lunar south pole. Scientists believe the crater may contain frozen water and expected it to be kicked up by the impact. One theory is that the impact site was unexpectedly hard and that rock and soil gouged out by the impact failed to rise high enough to be lit up by sunlight.

"If it turns out to be as dull as it looked, I'd imagine the soil just didn't respond as was hoped to being hit," said Vincent Eke, an astronomer at the University of Durham who helped Nasa choose the impact site. "It might mean we don't get sufficient data, which would be a shame," he added.

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