NASA UPDATES: NASA to Bomb the Moon on Friday

-->

NASA has elected the finishing destination for the LCROSS lunar impacting probe: the crater Cabeus A, close to the Moon’s South Pole.

So why is NASA smacking a look into the Moon at high speed, and why there? The actual reason will not be known, because this is NASA after all, so here is the 'official version':

The idea is that over millions and billions of years, a bundle of comets have hit the Moon. The water from these comets will hit the surface and sublimates away, but if some settles at the bottoms of deep craters close to the Moon’s poles, these everlastingly shadowed regions can act as a refrigerator, keeping the water from vanishing. It can inhabit there, locked up as ice, for a very long time. Several estimates pointed out that there might be billions of tons of ice close to the Moon’s South Pole.

Detecting that water is not easy. Radar results have been inconclusive, with a few people saying there are lots of water and others saying there is none at all.

By impacting a survey there, any ice that are located at the impact site will be shot up on top of the lunar surface, where sunlight will split it up into O+ and OH- molecules, which can be detected. Thus, LCROSS. I have an additional detailed description of all this in a former blog post about LCROSS.

The choice of Cabeus A for the impact site is a good one. It is near the South Pole and it is a likely spot for there to be ice below the surface moreover it is on the near side of the Moon, so people back here on Earth can watch it, but close enough to the limb that any ejected water can be seen.