By Friday morning, we can expect that any aliens on the moon will be really ticked off at us.
But if we're really lucky, the drinks they pour to toast our demise will be, er, on the rocks.
Friday is the day NASA's LCROSS mission (short for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) sends a spent booster rocket crashing into a crater near the lunar south pole, looking to see if there is ice mixed in the soil of the crater's floor. Scientists think there may be billions of gallons of it, but so far they haven't been able to prove it.
So the LCROSS booster will go plowing into the moon's surface at 5,600 miles per hour. It is expected to make a crater about 60 feet across -- and send 350 tons of rock and soil flying in all directions, creating a plume several miles high. If there is ice mixed in, a small satellite, flying on the same path less than 400 miles behind the rocket, should be able to detect it before it crashes too, about four minutes later.
"We can directly measure water ice, and then we can fly right through the plume," said LCROSS project manager Daniel Andrews.
The whole thing is set to happen at 7:31 a.m. ET on Friday, and telescopes on earth (plus the Hubble telescope in orbit) will be watching. Source abcnews.go.com
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