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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ LRO & LCROSS _ LCROSS results

Posted by: elakdawalla Jan 14 2010, 12:02 AM

There hasn't been much activity on the "LCROSS Impact" thread since a few weeks after the Oct 8 impact, so it seemed like a good place to break and start a new thread for results.

I don't know what results will be discussed this evening, but there is -- in about one hour from the time I post this -- going to be a live webcast and Q and A with PI Tony Colaprete. Via @MyMoonLPI on Twitter: "Chat with LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete TONIGHT @ 8 pm Eastern, http://bit.ly/4Gfhbj "

Posted by: marsophile Jan 16 2010, 12:19 AM

A few points covered in the webcast, if I remember correctly: ratio of water to dust directly measured in plume, about 4%; surprisingly, a lot of molecular hydrogen (H2), and other volatiles. Also mercury, light hydrocarbons including methane, CO2, and ammonia. Similarities to comet or asteroidal material. Much of impact energy absorbed in vaporizing the volatiles.

Posted by: nprev Jan 16 2010, 12:45 AM

The Hg detection continues to surprise me. However, if you consider it as a volatile, then it actually provides supporting evidence for the cold-trap mechanism.

In fact...WAG here, but since it's such a heavy element & much of the impact energy apparently was expended in vaporizing volatiles, does its presence explain the understated flash?

Posted by: Byran Feb 11 2010, 07:42 PM

ftp://ftp.lpi.usra.edu/pub/outgoing/lpsc2010/full204.pdf

QUOTE
However the SPH calculation shows that the H2O mass ejected over the 2.5 km height is ~150 kg [4], when assuming the water content in the excavated lunar soil is 1 wt %. The difference between our observation resuts and pre-mission SPH calculation results [4] would suggest three possible interpretations. The first interpretaion is the lack of water in the shallow regions in the PSA. However because the upper limit of the ejecta (~1000 kg) and H2O mass (~40 kg) obtained by Subaru leads to ~4 wt % of water content, four times the estimate for average abundance (~1 wt %) from LP observation [2] Thus this interpretation of dry upper layer is not necessarily supported by our observation. The second interpretation is that ice grains excavated by the Centaur impact had a very large average size, slowing the rate of sublimation greatly. However this interpretation is inconsistent with the observation of the significant amount of water vapor observed by the SS/C, which can see the ejecta as low as about 1 km above the floor of Cabeus crater. The third interpretation is that the amount of high-speed ejecta reaching the height of the slit of the Subaru telescope was much smaller than the theoretical estimates. The IRCS imaging observation results [7] also supports this interpretations. There are two possible mechanisms for this interpretation. (1) The cut-off velocity exists between the ejection velocity reaching the height observable by the S-S/C and the ejection velocity reaching the height observable by the Subaru telescope. (2) The ejection angle of the Centaur impact was much smaller than that of standard impact cases (~45°).

Posted by: Vultur Apr 2 2010, 08:45 AM

There's a news article http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/22/moon-water-comes-different-flavors-say-scientist/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fscitech+%28Text+-+SciTech%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher about water results from LCROSS and Chandrayaan-1.

Posted by: MahFL Apr 2 2010, 10:26 AM

Mines a glass of the pure water...thankyou. ohmy.gif

Posted by: Phil Stooke Jun 10 2010, 09:19 PM

The raw data from LCROSS are now available at PDS.

Phil

Posted by: JohnVV Jun 11 2010, 12:25 AM

cool but the lola has not been updated

Posted by: djellison Jun 11 2010, 12:57 AM

LOLA is nothing to do with LCROSS.

Posted by: elakdawalla Oct 18 2010, 07:01 PM

QUOTE
MEDIA ADVISORY: M10-144

NASA HOSTS MEDIA TELECON FEATURING RESULTS OF MOON MISSION IMPACT THE SCIENCE JOURNAL HAS EMBARGOED INFORMATION UNTIL 2 P.M. EDT ON OCT. 21

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.

The panelists are:
-- Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington
-- Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator, NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
-- David Paige, Diviner instrument principal investigator, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
-- Igor Mitrofanov, Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector principal investigator, Institute for Space Research, Moscow
-- Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences, Brown University, Providence, R.I. and LCROSS science team member
-- Paul Hayne, graduate student at UCLA and Diviner team member
-- Randy Gladstone, Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project deputy principal investigator, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
-- Richard Vondrak, LRO project scientist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

To view supporting information available at the start of the teleconference, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio


I will be calling in to the teleconference and write about it for the blog. Since the LCROSS data set is available, I've written on my to-do list an item to take a look at the data and see if there are any fun images to pull out. However, it's going to be a busy week for me. If anyone reading this has thought "I ought to see what I can get out of the LCROSS data set and post it on UMSF," this would be a good week to do it smile.gif

Posted by: stewjack Oct 21 2010, 05:58 PM

NASA News Audio Live Streaming starts in a few minutes! 2:00 PM EST 18:00 UTC

http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

LISTEN LIVE NOW: › http://www.nasa.gov/ram/67946main_audioconf.ram | › http://www.nasa.gov/333091main_NASA_News_Audio_Windows.asx
This link may not be active until 10-15 minutes before the start of the teleconference.

Jack

EDIT Media material page
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/oct_21_media_telecon.html

Posted by: silylene Oct 22 2010, 01:56 PM

Happily, I find I correctly predicted finding Hg in permanently shadowed craters on the moon, in 2008, according to the same mechanism now being offered:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=5596&pid=165706&st=0&#entry165706

Posted by: nprev Feb 18 2011, 10:03 PM

Apologies for thread revival, but I've not seen this visible light image of the LCROSS http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/509507main_plume.jpg before.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/news/lunar-water-metal.html

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