On the morning of Friday, October 9, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will smash-land into the belly of a crater called Cabeus near the south pole of the Moon. Oh yes, it’s going to be quite a sight. You should watch it live here.

Why, you might ask, are we assaulting the moon? Did it say something bad about us? Did it un-friend us on Facebook? Has it not been returning our calls?

As it turns out, this isn’t really a lunar attack at all. NASA designed the LCROSS mission in an attempt to find water on the moon, and scientists believe that Cabeus has a good chance of being the jackpot. The expectation is that Cabeus (and other craters) are home to H20 deposits left over by comets that have been colliding with the moon for billions of years. The LCROSS impact itself is expected to create a crater-within-the-crater that could be as much as 70 feet wide and 16 feet deep — and that could blast up enough lunar dust to fill almost 18 school buses.

Set your alarm clocks for Friday morning. The impact is expected to occur at around 7:30 a.m. Eastern, which is 4:30 for those of you out west. And have we mentioned that you can watch it live here??

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Notes from Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.