LCROSS and LRO mission results to be published Thursday.

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 21, to discuss additional findings from NASA's Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, missions.

The results will be featured in six papers published in the Oct. 22 issue of the journal Science. The journal's embargo on these results will be lifted at the start of the telecon. The briefing will focus on the data from:
--The Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment which measures surface and subsurface
temperatures from orbit.
-- The Lyman Alpha Mapping Project which is mapping the entire lunar surface in the
far ultraviolet spectrum.
-- The Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector which creates high-resolution maps of
hydrogen distribution and gathers information about the neutron component of the
lunar radiation environment

www.nasa.gov...
lcross.arc.nasa.gov...

Remember the LCROSS mission that impacted the moon in October last year and was launched in July 09 with the LRO (Lunar reconnaissance Orbiter)?
It certainly caused a stir here at ATS.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Well for those interested the result are going to be published in the upcoming issue of the Science Journal and be released in a teleconference to be held by NASA this Thursday, the 21st of October.

reply to post by pazcat


I dont think the results are going to be as drastic and dramatic as some would wish, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

These are interesting times we live in.

reply to post by InertiaZero


Exactly, I doubt it is going to be sexy enough news for many, considering the threads that were made around the time of impact.
But I would dare say they will be rather significant to possible future missions. I mean it was essentially looking for water particles so the results would be quite important.
Definitely interesting anyway.

I Bet. Nothing new on NASA report.
Sterilized report....

Maybe some good news from Russia, China, India or Japan.

The results are out. They found a lot of interesting stuff:

Water on the Moon and Much, Much More: Latest LCROSS Results

www.universetoday.com...

With a combination of near-infrared, ultraviolet and visible spectrometers onboard the shepherding spacecraft, LCROSS found about 155 kilograms (342 pounds) of water vapor and water ice were blown out of crater and into the LCROSS field of view. From that, Colaprete and his team estimate that approximately 5.6 percent of the total mass inside Cabeus crater (plus or minus 2.9 percent) could be attributed to water ice alone.

Colaprete said finding ice in concentrations – “blocks” of ice — is extremely important. “It means there has to be some kind of process by which it is being enhanced, enriched and concentrated so that you have what is called a critical cluster that allows germ formation and crystalline growth and condensation of ice. So that data point is important because now we have to ask that questions how did it become ice,” he said.

In with the water vapor, the LCROSS team also saw two ‘flavors’ of hydroxyl. “We saw one that was emitting as it if it was just being excited,” Colaprete said, “which means this OH could have come from grains — it could be the adsorbed OH we saw in the M Cubed data, as it was released or liberated from a hot impact and coming up into view. We also see an emission from OH that is called prompt emission, which is unique to the emission you get when OH is formed through photolysis.”

Then came the ‘much more.’ Between the LCROSS instruments, the Lunar Reconnassance Orbiter’s observations – and in particular the LAMP instrument (Lyman Alpha Mapping Project) – the most abundant volatile in terms of total mass was carbon monoxide, then was water, the hydrogen sulfide. Then was carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, formaldehyde, perhaps ethylene, ammonia, and even mercury and silver.

“So there’s a variety of different species, and what is interesting is that a number of those species are common to water,” Colaprete said. “So for example the ammonia and methane are at concentrations relative to the total water mass we saw, similar to what you would see in a comet.”

There's any number of explanations for the presence of the numerous compounds they found, including comet impacts and outgassing from the early solidification of the crust. Seems like they got a lot of data, which makes for a pretty darn successful mission.

It's made the BBC news. Here's THE LINK if anyone's interested.

I can't believe it's been a whole year since that anti-climax! It did teach me to be more patient and not to expect so much from these things, though! ;-)