Inside Nasa

Inside NASA's Plan to Bomb the Moon and Find Water Short on time and tight on money, a team of NASA engineers aims to solve the mystery of lunar ice in late winter—by crashing its low-budget kamikaze spacecraft into a crater. By Michael Milstein Published in the September 2008 issue. Page 1 2 3 Next » Email Print Buzz up! Buzz up! this story

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Moon spacecraft Northrop Grumman NASA Future Of Space

Northrop Grumman engineers in Redondo Beach, Calif., lower the LCROSS spacecraft into a vacuum chamber that simulates conditions in space. It will be destroyed while seeking water ice on the moon.

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Astronomers hate the moon. It's so bright that it blinds telescopes like the sun in a

driver's eyes. There's no atmosphere, and the geology is basically dead. Maybe that's why, decades after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked there, we have clearer maps of Mars than of our nearest neighbor. But now, NASA needs to know more. The agency plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 12 years as the first step in establishing a permanent outpost. The base could be an ideal location for manufacturing processes best suited for low gravity, or for helium-3 mining to fuel future fusion reactors. The agency also sees the moon as the perfect construction site and launchpad for eventual manned journeys to Mars. Water is a key ingredient in these grand schemes, because it can be broken down into oxygen for lunar bases and fuel for rockets. In 1998 a probe called Lunar Prospector spotted tantalizing signs of hydrogen in craters at the lunar poles. But no one's sure if

the hydrogen is the chemical signature of water ice, possibly deposited by comets and meteors. NASA's first step toward a moon base is the $491 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a satellite designed to map the terrain in intimate detail. In January 2006, after several years of development, LRO engineers decided to use a larger Atlas V to launch LRO, creating 2200 pounds of extra cargo capacity. The agency put out the word to its 10 research centers: What can you come up with to make use of that space— before the earliest LRO launch window in October 2008?

Winning a Free Ride Dan Andrews, a rangy, plain-spoken Silicon Valley native with 21 years at NASA, reacted quickly to the call for proposals. He and other engineers from Ames Research Center near San Jose, Calif., formed what they called the Blue Ice team and met in an old Navy dorm, hoping to dream up a project that would probe the polar craters for water. There was more at stake than proving water ice existed on the moon: "It was to get back in the game," Andrews says. Ames's aging wind tunnels and battleship-gray buildings in Silicon Valley, once hotbeds of aeronautical research, sit in the technological shadow of nearby Google and eBay. NASA has cut its programs and threatened it with closure. Now, Ames had a shot at retooling itself as a shop for fast, cheap missions. Andrews had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F. Instead, Blue Ice and its partners at Northrop Grumman came up with a concept to bring the lunar floor out in the open. A bare-bones spacecraft, dubbed the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), would sit beneath the LRO atop the Atlas rocket. After launch, with the LRO safely bound for the moon, LCROSS would remain attached to the Atlas's spent upper-stage rocket, known as the Centaur. Using the moon's gravity, LCROSS would maneuver the Centaur—"like a VW steering a school bus," Andrews says—into an elongated orbit around Earth that assured a collision with one of the moon's poles. Nine hours before impact, 24,000 miles above the lunar surface, LCROSS and the Centaur would separate. The 5000-pound Centaur would crash into a dark crater at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kicking up a plume of debris more than 6 miles high. Four minutes later, the heavily instrumented LCROSS would ride the plume, checking for water and relaying data to Earth until it, too, slammed into the lunar surface. Just three months after NASA called for proposals, LCROSS beat 18 other submissions from leading centers such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center. Now all they had to do was assemble a first-of-its-kind spacecraft at a breakneck pace (30 months) for a bargain price ($79 million). "Whatever had to happen," says Marvin Christensen, acting chief of Ames, "had to happen at warp speed for NASA." (Editors’ note: The LCROSS mission has been delayed until late February or early March 2009, due to delays in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. But that’s not stopping its engineers....)