News and Events

Data Center hosts Lcross breakfast

The Data Center, in collaboration with RI Space Grant, hosted an "LCROSS breakfast" on October 9th, 2009. Approximately 60 students attended, watching the impact live on NASA TV plus an internet stream for an overflow crowd.

While this lunar impact was not as visually impressive as Deep Impact, the numerous cameras, spectrometers, and photometers recorded the moment of impact and debris rising into sunlight. These data are being analyzed with first results reported at the American Geophysical Union in December 2009.

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin impacts on the moon's surface Oct. 9, 2009 in a search for water ice. Scientists will analyze data from the spacecraft's instruments to assess whether water ice is present.

The satellite traveled 5.6 million miles during a historic 113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the moon's south pole. The spacecraft was launched June 18 as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.