LCROSS Centaur Impact Flash (2009 Oct 10)

[robotwisdom]

How wide was the flash?

Very important question!

As best I can guestimate using Google Earth's Moon map (which appears inverted compared to this APOD image), the round crater below the flash is about ten miles wide, so the flash is one-half to one mile in diameter.

And come to think of it, that would imply the height of the 'plume' was well under one mile.

[robotwisdom]

Newest image: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... moon_crash

[zbvhs]

It was an awfully crude experiment for 100 million bucks, but then, that's probably all you get for the money these days. Why is nobody talking about a Lunar rover? That's really what you need for problems like these.

[Chris Peterson]

It was an awfully crude experiment for 100 million bucks, but then, that's probably all you get for the money these days. Why is nobody talking about a Lunar rover? That's really what you need for problems like these.

More like 70 million dollars. In what way was the experiment crude? This isn't the first space mission to use an impact for diagnostic purposes, and it is a tried-and-true method of physical analysis, found from high energy physics to materials science. In fact, I'd consider the experiment rather elegant: utilize the kinetic energy of a component that otherwise has no further value, and monitor the released products with a sophisticated array of imaging and spectroscopic instruments. All of which was done, and done successfully.