LCROSS卫星半人马火箭的撞击闪光补充图
出自：连线网站Millions of people had watched live onthe internet as the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite andits two-tonne Centaur rocket approached the Moon's south pole as part of Nasa's £49million science experiment. The rocket was first to crash,plunging into the pitch-black Cabeus crater at 12.31pm yesterday. Nasa hoped itwould blast 350 tonnes of rock and dust into a cloud, leaving behind adimple the third the size of a football pitch.
Travelling faster than a bullet, it was supposed to hit with the force of 1.5 tonnes of TNTand create a mini-crater about half the size of anOlympic pool. The second crash, caused by the smaller LCROSS probe, was to be about one-third as strong.
在华盛顿博物馆的大屏幕上展现的美国宇航局在加利福尼亚州艾姆斯研究中心 LCROSS探测器的首席研究员托尼Colaperte在演播室讲解！ LCROSS探测器分离撞击示意图！ 撞击前和撞击后图像比较！ 自己看吧！
The webcast images of the craterloomed larger and larger as the satellite approached on its collisioncourse, but still showed no sign of a flash or a cloud of debris.
Nasa officials said theirinstruments were working, but the planned live photos were missing. Theonly evidence of an impact was a small heat signature picked up by theLCROSS probe's infra-red camera.
Expectationsby the public for live plume video were probably too high and based onpre-crash animations, some of which were not by Nasa, said projectmanager Dan Andrews.
Nasa'sdirector at the Ames Research Centre which monitored the missionMichael Bicay admitted: 'We didn't see a big splashy plume like wewanted to see.'
Prior toimpact some scientists had claimed that there was chance that it wouldbe clear within an hour of the collision whether there was water on theMoon. Now Nasa say it will probably be two weeks before they have ananswer.
Another issueregarding the impacts was the poor lighting, said Mr Andrews. Expertssaid the images could be essentially 'grey against black'.
'Whatmatters for us is: What is the nature of the stuff that was kicked upgoing in?' he said. 'All nine instruments were working fine and wereceived good data.' 本帖最后由 skyczheng 于 2009-10-12 23:36 编辑
Mr Andrews said the science team wasporing over the information - including what are supposed to be goodimages from ground-based telescopes on Earth - to answer the bigquestion: Is there some form of water under the moon's surface that wasdislodged?
It will probably be two weeks before scientists will be certain about the answer, he said.
Before the crash, mission scientists said there was a chance that if itwas really moist under the crater, they'd know about water within anhour. That's not the case now, Mr Andrews said.
People who got up before dawn to look for the crash at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory exchanged confused looks instead.
Dr Eke's team discovered strongevidence of hydrogen - a key component of water - within coldpermanently shadowed craters at the Moon's poles, where temperaturesfall to minus 200C.
Finding water, which could be usedfor drinking, making fuel and providing oxygen, would have majorimplications for the future of moon exploration.
A ready supply of water would make it far more practicable to build lunar bases or launch missions to Mars from the Moon.
Dr Eke, who led a study of data fromNasa's 1998 Lunar Prospector mission which revealed hydrogenconcentrated in darkened craters, said: 'There's absolutely no doubtthat they hit the place they were aiming for, but how material getsthrown out from the surface depends on whether it's rocky or loose. Ifyou hit a sponge, you're not going to see anything.
'It sounds like they got an infrared signal, but its too early to predict yet what they're likely to get.'
Last month new findings from threespacecraft, including India's Chandrayaan-1 probe, showed that smallamounts of water might be chemically bound up with the Moon's soil.
Anthony Colaprete, principalinvestigator for the mission, cautioned: 'We don't anticipate anythingabout presence or absence of water immediately. It's going to take ussome time.'
If hydrogen is present as water ice,then the data would imply the top metre of the surface in these cratersholds about 200,000 million litres of water in total. 这是美国宇航局发布显示月球LCROSS探测器针对南极陨石坑Cabeus中心的撞击碎片扩散影响！ 拍的不错 支持一个
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