Saturday, October 17, 2009

The elusive LCROSS impact plume.

Yes, there was a plume. I wasn't visible from Earth, but the LRO spacecraft spotted it from orbit 600 km away. The plume was 6 - 8 km wide, which was about what was expected wasn't it? The image has been stretched to pull out the details in the darkness. Kind of looks like one of those ink splotch things, look at it long enough and you'll see things. I think I pick out a lobster and a moose!
The Centaur also created a crater that is approximately 92 feet wide. Hard to see it since it's in the dark corner of the crater, but the dark corner was the target anyway to hopefully find evidence of water. No results released yet, but NASA is very pleased with the results so far. The public? - I think they expected too much out of this.
Just give them time to sort out the data, I'm sure water will be found!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Doesn't it look like there are other places in the image that are similar to what they are calling the plume? Little whitish blobs. It doesn't seem as special as we'd like it to be because of them. Odd.