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Officials at Ames Research Center in Northern California, which managed the mission, released images Friday that clearly show a plume of debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency’s rocket plowed into it.
The plume reached an estimated mile above the lunar surface.
Creating a plume was key to the mission’s success because the goal was to measure dust kicked up by the Centaur rocket to find out whether ice might lie hidden in polar craters that haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years. To do that, the accompanying $79-million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite was to fly through the debris cloud so its spectrometers and cameras could sample the lunar dust.
Everything appeared to go as planned in the early morning hours of Oct. 9, except that no debris plume appeared as the LCROSS satellite followed the Centaur into the crater.
