Moon-Eyed, We Return With a Real Icebreaker

NASA Craft, Booster Shot To Crash Into Polar Crater

America is returning to the moon -- violently. A rocket booster and a small spacecraft will crash into the moon Friday morning at 5,600 mph. The Earth's satellite will have two new craters.

Conspiracy theorists are not happy about the "bombing" of the moon. They say it's probably a military test. Naturally there's a "Do Not Bomb the Moon" Web site.

There is no bomb, actually. But that's beside the point: The important thing is that this is a star turn for the moon. The moon has been rather boring in recent years even by the standards of lifeless wastelands. No astronauts have visited. There's never any weather. There are no volcanoes. Our moon lacks the kind of typhoons that drop methane rain on Saturn's Titan. No one has ever accused the moon of harboring a subsurface ocean like some of Jupiter's moons. Carl Sagan never countenanced the possibility that the moon is artificial, as he did, briefly, with the Martian moon Phobos.

The main function of our moon has been to inspire song lyrics and give wolves something to howl at. Also it stabilizes the Earth's axial tilt, making Earthlife as we know it possible -- if you want to get all technical about it. But since Apollo, the moon has largely been in eclipse, public-relations-wise. Until now. After so many years of being the place where nothing ever happens, the moon has suddenly become the hottest satellite in the solar system.

NASA thinks there could be water, in the form of ice, lurking at the lunar poles. The space agency is eager to see what will spew from a cold, dark crater at the moon's south pole when the rocket booster and spacecraft crash early Friday morning. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is a science mission, but it's also a show, a demolition derby that will attract the gaze of the Hubble Space Telescope and telescopes on land around the world.

The first impact will be at 7:31 a.m. Eastern time -- 7:31:19 to be precise -- and the second impact four minutes later. Amateur astronomers with large telescopes can try to observe from their back yards, but NASA officials say it'll be hard to detect, and that the best place to watch will be online as the LCROSS spacecraft watches the booster slam into the moon and streams the video onto the Internet. In Washington, the public can watch on a big screen at the Newseum.

"You'll see a flash of light, and we have a special instrument called the Total Luminance Photometer -- TLP -- specifically designed to look at that flash, which is very quick," said NASA planetary scientist Jennifer Heldmann.

NASA scientists announced just a few weeks ago that, using remote instruments, they'd found telltale signs of water on the moon. The water isn't liquid. It's in the form of molecules that come and go on the lunar surface.

"Who woulda thunk that the moon has a water cycle on it, perhaps?" Anthony Colaprete, the LCROSS principal investigator, said in a conference call Thursday, reflexively tarnishing a good quote with the scientific caveat.

"You can see, right now, on an international scale, a real upswell of interest about the moon," enthused Daniel Andrews, the LCROSS project manager.

Wait, there's more gushing from NASA lunar scientist Mike Wargo: "It's starting to seem in some ways that it's a new moon."

And yet in some ways the moon is in hot water: LCROSS is a mission of the "Exploration" directorate at NASA, the sector of the space agency whose future is most up in the air. This mission was dreamed up in the context of a NASA strategy that foresees sending astronauts back to the moon by 2020. But the Obama administration appointed a review panel, led by retired aerospace executive Norm Augustine, that has said there's not a chance that the moon can be reached by 2020 with existing budgets. The panel isn't even sure a return to the moon makes sense.