Did the Moon move for you?
It wasn't Hollywood; it wasn't Bruce Willis. But I don't really think anyone truly expected that it would be.
Nasa slammed a segment of rocket into the Moon today to see if it could kick up sufficient debris that it might be able to detect the presence of water.
It has long been suspected that some of the craters in the Moon's polar regions might hide ice in their permanently shadowed regions - ice that was delivered billions of years ago by comets or water-rich asteroids.
We all looked intently at the images fed back to Earth by a closely trailing spacecraft, LCROSS (the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite).
We were told to look for a sort of shimmering in the pictures.
Our armchair view of events switched between a visible camera and an infrared one.
I didn't see anything in the images; those around me didn't see anything either.
We weren't the only ones. One Twitter feed I checked belonged to colleague Dr Chris Lintott, the co-presenter of the BBC's long-running astronomy programme, The Sky At Night.
Chris was following everything in California at the Palomar Observatory, which has a 200-inch telescope. His tweet: "No plume visible from Palomar".
The good news, according to Nasa, is that LCROSS did manage to detect the impact, and the spectrometers onboard have returned important data.
The impact was set up to make the biggest debris field possible. The 2.2-tonne rocket upper-stage went into the Moon at 2.5km/s at an angle of 80 degrees.
The target - the Cabeus Crater - was chosen because lighting conditions would be ideal to illuminate the ejected dirt and rock, some of which was expected to lift 10km above the crater floor (Cabeus is 100km wide and 3-4km deep).
There is a huge mountain that sits on the rim of Cabeus, but light streaming down a valley towards the crater should have made for excellent observing conditions.
Nasa will take its time to update us on the results. Don't expect immediate and definitive statements about success or failure. So many telescopes - both professional and amateur - were trained on this event that it will take some time to produce a full assessment.
All Nasa will say for now is that is has the data it needs to do the analysis.
But what if it gets a minimal or zero signal for water in any ejected plume? What does that mean?
If the signal is very low, it has "resource implications". Remember, this mission was part of the robotic preparation to return astronauts to the Moon.
A series of unmanned probes will map the lunar surface in the coming years, to find the best landing sites for humans.
If water-ice exists at the poles in shadowed craters, it could be useful - to drink and to make rocket fuel. It could help sustain a long-term base of the kind envisaged by President George Bush when he set Nasa on a new course of exploration in 2004.
And with every kilo of payload costing something in excess of $20,000 to launch to the Moon, any item which can be "purchased" locally would be a huge advantage.
But if there really is little in the way of water, it may put a big question mark against the idea of bases. We've seen already from the Augustine committee set up by President Obama to review the Bush plans that thinking in the US may already be shifting to the idea of a few, shorter visits, and not extended stays.
It could be, of course, that the rocket just hits a dry hole; it could be that plenty of water-ice is buried on the Moon but that it's not very evenly distributed. However, this would seem unlikely.
Another reason Cabeus was chosen was because it was shown by a previous mission to be an excellent candidate.
The Lunar Prospector spacecraft which finished its mission in 1999 found a strong signal for hydrogen at the crater. Hydrogen by itself is not proof of the presence of water, but most think of it as a reasonable proxy.
Over to you, Nasa.
I’m 
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~33~RS~)
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Hmmm. Spectacular images of impact... mind you, Rangers 7-9 did that in the 1960s. Slick presentation on NASA TV and the Scientific Director of NASA-Ames - evidently as underwhelmed as the rest of us - if the camera gain was set right, which was revealing.
In the thermal imaging, which should have shown something, even if the plume didn't get high enough to reach daylight, the level of colour scale looked to have far too little resolution. The floor of the crater was a far too uniform blue, with too little temperature resolution, so perhaps it is not surprising that nothing was seen.
Mind you, this was not the first time that NASA has tried an impact in a polar crater. The last attempt, a few years ago, produced no visible reaction. I would guess that the PR people at NASA are disappointed that this high-energy impact was not much of a spectacle either!
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Tired of polluting the Earth we are now polluting the Moon with more pointless experiments.
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Maybe NASA should not build up the event as much as they have. It would always be a non event because you not see anything. It is on the dark side of the moon after all.
Pure science stuff should be done quietly really.
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This should have read:
"the Scientific Director of NASA-Ames - evidently as underwhelmed as the rest of us - ASKING if the camera gain was set right"
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I'm sorry but am I the only person wondering if the huge amount of money it took to carry out this experiment could have been better spent?
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Acceptabledavyman, the Russians started crashing probes into the Moon in 1958! The Americans have crashed all kinds of things into the Moon such as used Lunar Module upper stages and Saturn V third stages. No one complained at the time.
Foxhound, this was a small, cheap mission by space exploration standards. Finding industrial quantities of ice on the Moon would be worth possibly trillions of dollars in the future. It is not a bad investment. Would you have told Christopher Columbus that his voyage of discovery was a waste of money, that nothing good would come of it and that the funds should be used for something nore useful???
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acceptabledavyman beat me to it.
We've already ruined our own planet, so I suppose it is now time to turn our attention to causing mayhem on our closest neighbour?
I love all things astronomical, but I really can't fully describe just how negative my thoughts are on this waste of time.
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72 million usd just doesn't buy the special effects scfi fans expect. Vikings landing on Mars was the same way. Putting the highly used upper stage Centaur on center stage was nice. The spacecraft centaur sep earlier with two flash streamed videos was impressive. The landing crash video..Hollywood could have dont it better...and as for the US national radio show coast to coast am...hey where's the damn moon base...huh..
Very professional but no whiz bang..
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Nice to see the myopic types in full flow here.
Clearly with no knowledge of the history of science, which is littered with naysayers moaning about this exploration or that an experiment is pointless.
From Columbus though to Edison and much more besides.
As for cost, less than a 'summer spectacular' from Hollywood.
NASA's budget is tiny compared to the whole government spend, scrap it all tomorrow and you'd not notice any difference in either your taxes or other funding.
The unemployment lines would get longer though,
Indeed, when it's budgets where shredded in the 70's and since, the world and it's myriad problems remained the same, or got worse, or in some cases improved.
Notice how up and coming nations do not have this cannot see beyond your nose view?
They think it's a good investment.
To the mission and the water issue, it has to be remembered that Apollo, the unmanned probes that preceded it, left a chunk of the Moon almost still unexplored.
The Southern Polar area.
Apollo could not land there, the SIM bay instruments on the orbiting Command Modules of Apollos 15-17 limited in their ground track, went nowhere near.
The argument about littering the Moon is bizarre, the amount of probes, Apollo gear, rocket stages spread over the whole surface is tiny.
And I trust those who object avoid littering the Earth by living in a cave or at least, Unabomber style.
With digging implement in hand for every call of nature.
However, I'm not sold on the establishment of a base on the Moon.
Unless the presence of ice is proved beyond doubt.
But I have a feeling the best chance of doing just that is to send a manned mission to the Southern Polar region.
A stay time of a couple of weeks, much more capable drilling gear and all that comes with such a greatly enhanced mission as planned.
In the same way that the most scientifically significant sample of the 800lbs return, of the Apollo programme, the 'Genesis Rock' from Apollo 15, probably would not have been found by even a modern unmanned rover, sometimes human intuition is vital.
However, there is still a sound scientific case of a series of missions to some areas of special interest, since even the most basic missions planned will be far more capable than the Apollo system eventually extended to with the last three 'J' missions.
There is also a case for developing this infrastructure and capability, which also is suitable for Asteroid exploration, which one day might be of fundamental importance to the future of humanity.
I'm not thinking of this in some bad Bruce Willis movie, but enhancing our knowledge of these objects is worthwhile, could one on a collision course be deflected by attaching a propulsion device, how varied are the compositions of them?
101 years ago it was an uninhabited zone in Siberia that took a devastating space impact,and that only exploded in the atmosphere, not anywhere near a (extremely rare) extinction event level, but since then the with the population explosion, the mass urbanisation this has brought, we won't be so lucky next time.
Or one would just impact in the sea for a major event or worse, which we saw in December 2004.
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Forget water...fact is, there was no visible plume at all. That is extremely interesting, as it tells us there's something about the floor of Cabeus. It is incredibly hard, or incredibly soft. I think the former, and given the behaviour of rocks and water ice at the temperatures in that crater's floor, perhaps it's a sign that there is more ice than we imagined.
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The comments about wasted money ring a bell.
I know that if given money or if If I have money in my pocket I will spend it, so I save money or invest money by having it taken from my paycheck.
This is a similar situation. The investment in NASA is not up there with the investment in social programs...and...yes, I'm rationalizing.
But, I'm happy some work was done to experiment in space with my tax money (and maybe some other countries money)
I do know that the Russians call the International Space Station the Russian space station, because they have contributed so much to it. Hmm, where is the criticism of that ...nationalism and science together? ....omg.
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Of course there is water on the moon. The moon is made of cheese as shown in the documentary "A Grand Day Out". The Wensleydale web site shows that the water content of a nice piece of Wensleydale is about 40%.
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We were watching LIVE footage from something over 250,000km away hurtling towards the moon at over 7,000kph and people complain that it's boring because there wasn't a big movie style bang?
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Some people are never happy! Wasn't the big bag that some had hoped for... if they had been a big explosion then all the conspiracy theorists would have said it had all a fix and had been done with special effects. NASA and any scientific organisation do experiments to see what happens, not because they know what will happen. This is the basis of any good science, create a theory then test it, then keep repeating the experiments and therefore over time you gain data that will lead to knowledge.
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