David Paige, a professor of planetary sciences, invited students and staff to his house early on Friday to watch a rocket and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, deliberately crash into the moon in an attempt to find evidence of water.
The rocket crashed at 4:31 a.m. PST. Although they didn’t see much of an explosion, and many were bleary-eyed from waking up so early, the viewers were nevertheless delighted and relieved at the success of the crash.
Paige is the principal investigator of the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, a radiometer connected to a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that observes the surface of the moon through thermal maps.
Diviner detected the temperature of the surface of the moon before and after the impact of the spacecraft, Paige said. Knowing the temperature can determine how much water can come out of the crater, how big the crater was and the strength of the impact, he added.
“It’s too early to tell if we’ve found evidence of water,” he said. “We haven’t had a chance to look at all the data.”
He added that regardless of what the mission discovers, it has proven to be unique.
Paul Hayne and Benjamin Greenhagen, who worked on the Diviner experiment under Paige, were in Puerto Rico for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society when they gathered into an auditorium to watch a live presentation of the crash.
“We were disappointed there wasn’t more of a flash and wasn’t much to see,” said Hayne, a graduate student in the earth and space sciences department. “But when we got images from the Diviner back and could see a bright impact, we were elated.”
Currently, Hayne is working to calibrate raw data from Diviner to find the true temperatures of the lunar surface before and after the impact of the crash, work that is “pretty grueling.” But he said that it was rewarding to be one of the first two people in the world to get the images and data recorded by Diviner.
Greenhagen, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was also among the first to see calibrated data from Diviner. He received a doctorate in geology from UCLA last spring while working on the Diviner experiment with Paige. Greenhagen designed three of Diviner’s nine channels to measure lunar surface composition and investigated Diviner’s response to temperatures of rock and soil.
Christopher Russell, a professor of geophysics and planetary physics, is currently editing a book on the LCROSS and LRO missions.
“While it may seem strange for NASA to be crashing spacecraft, there is a good reason,” he said. “If we want to send men into space or inhabit a moon base for exploration, it’s really important to have accessible water to drink or to make fuel,” he said.
The mission began with the launch of a rocket connected to the LCROSS and LRO spacecrafts, with the LRO splitting off and orbiting the moon, he said.
Then, on Friday, an upper-stage rocket was deliberately launched into the moon, shortly followed by the LCROSS spacecraft itself, into one of the shadowed areas in the southern pole where water would most likely be deposited.
The crash was intended to lift material up from the surface, like “throwing a rock in sand,” and boil off or evaporate any water or ice that may be present, he added.
Russell first discovered his passion for space exploration while taking a summer job at a satellite operation center, analyzing data sent by a spacecraft studying the sun.
Inspired by the experience, he looked for opportunities to study space exploration as a graduate student at UCLA, calibrating data and publishing results from orbiting geophysical observatories before undertaking various projects for NASA.
He participated in the Apollo 15 and 16 space programs, which sent men to the moon and was the first to realize that thunderstorms were present on Venus.
UCLA is currently in charge of two missions for NASA, Russell said. Dawn is a pioneering mission that goes “into the heart” of the asteroid belt and explores the history of the solar system, he said.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission will be launched shortly and will look at the galaxy and beyond to measure basic radiation from the universe.
Russell said he thinks NASA is careful to provide adequate funds for each program and not “starve its scientists.” Although there’s always a demand for more funding so it can do more, NASA is doing as well as it can dividing its budget on as many different things as it can, he added.
“What we are learning today is truly amazing. At the end of the 19th century, people felt they had found all there was to learn, but in the 20th century, there was an explosion of new knowledge and interest in science,” he said. “The secret to success in life is to find something you really want to do and get paid for it, and scientists get to do that every day.”