NASA's always trying to push the envelope, and tomorrow the space agency's got a really big push: It's going to bomb the Moon. Seriously, and it's all in the name of science, the search for water, and space exploration.
If you're up at 7:31 a.m. EST (4:31 a.m. Pacific) tomorrow, cast your eyes skywards to the moon. You probably won't see anything with the naked eye (you'll need a 10-inch telescope) but right at that moment, thanks to some careful planning, the upper stage of the Atlas 5 rocket the propelled the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) to the moon will smack right into a crater called Cabeus. Four minutes later, LCROSS itself will meet the same fate. If that's not exciting enough for you, they'll be traveling at over five and a half thousand miles an hour when they hit. That's going to result in what we scientists call a pretty big bang.
All this is genuinely important--NASA's teams hope the kinetic impacts will throw up a plume of lunar soil far into the skies over the surface, and that among the debris will be water--NASA's going to have a bunch of instruments on LCROSS and elsewhere examining the events, looking for H2O's telltale signature.
Why do we care about water on the moon? For a whole bunch of reasons that concern our expansion of robotic and human exploration of the solar system. Lunar water would greatly simplify efforts to establish a base on the moon, and could be useful for storing energy through fuel-cells and for providing oxygen for lunar explorers.
Scientists are pretty certain they've detected plenty of water there already, but tomorrow's impact could provide definitive evidence--and enable a precise measure of the concentration of water in the soil. But is that justification for bombarding a heavenly body? A video on CNN shows people objecting to the effort:
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