Corner Jennifer Heldmann at a cocktail party and ask her what she’s doing at work these days, and the conversation will go something like this:
“We’re taking a big piece of metal and impacting the moon to kick up a big bunch of debris. Then we’re going to fly through the debris and see if there’s ice in it.”
It’s no tall tale – and Heldmann isn’t in need of psychiatric help. She’s one of a number of employees at the NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View behind one of the space agency’s more colorful – and important – upcoming missions.
In a little over 14 months, the agency will launch a rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center that will ultimately hurtle toward the moon at 5,600 mph, slam into one of its caverns and make a crater the size of a tennis court. Dust will rise 30 miles, exposing elements that have gone unseen by the sun for more than 2 billion years.
And for four precious minutes, multiple cameras and computers in a separate craft that detaches from the rocket will record images and measurements from the dust plume. The data will be transmitted to Earth until that craft also crashes into the moon.
“It is,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator of the mission, “going to be a pretty cool show.”
But the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite – LCROSS mission for short – isn’t just meant to give amateur stargazers something amazing to look at. Its primary purpose is to determine whether there’s ice in one of the darkest crevices of the moon, raising the possibility that a human outpost could one day be established there.
This week, NASA officials all but decided where to hit the moon, giving the unofficial thumbs-up to several proposed sites on the unexplored lunar south pole. The mission, which will cost $79 million, will probably launch in October of next year. The rocket would smash into the moon early in 2009.
For the NASA/Ames team working on LCROSS it has been an exciting – and exhausting – mission.
While some NASA workers have spent much of their career working on just one key project, the LCROSS team will have had just three years from its inception to its approval, development and fruition. The pace at Moffett Field is frenetic these days, said Heldmann, who often logs in 12-, 14- and even 17-hour days.
“It takes over your life,” she said. “But it’s fun. Who gets to send a mission to the moon?”
Lunar return
NASA’s last manned lunar landing happened in December 1972, when Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan and geologist Harrison Schmitt took the last human steps on its surface. At 31, Heldmann is so young that she missed all the landmark Apollo missions.
Yet the Bush administration has made lunar exploration one of its primary space goals, calling for astronauts to return to the moon for seven-day stays by the year 2018. The LCROSS mission will shed light on the resource potential of the moon for those future explorers.
If water is frozen in the lunar surface – a strong possibility in the valleys of its south pole, where temperatures are estimated to be more than 300 degrees below zero – it could perhaps be converted into drinking water, oxygen or even hydrogen for rocket fuel, Colaprete said. Even small amounts of lunar ice could be a boon to future lunar missions.
“To lift a pound of water to the moon probably costs around $15,000 to $20,000,” he said. “Water is an invaluable resource.”
Scientists had considered other ways to look for the presence of lunar ice, but none seemed quite as effective or inexpensive as hitting the moon with an object 30 feet long by 6 feet wide and as heavy as a large SUV, said Diane Wooden, an astrophysicist at NASA/Ames.
Using a rover to drill for water, for instance, could be problematic because if the lunar ice is patchy, “we could miss it,” Wooden said. Also, low temperatures at the south pole could disable drilling machinery.
As important as the search for water is, the LCROSS mission also stands to teach scientists much about the moon as well as the evolution of the solar system.
Unexplored craters
The dark crater floors on the moon’s south pole haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years, and researchers still know little about their composition.
“These crater floors are time capsules that contain a lot of information about the history of the moon,” Colaprete said, “and also the history of probably the most important element in the solar system: water.”
Scientists have speculated that if there is water on the moon, it may have been deposited there by comets and asteroids that have smashed into it.
When the LCROSS vehicle slams into the moon, the impact may be hidden from the view of Earth. But even those with amateur telescopes may be able to see the dirt and dust get thrown out of the dark crater and into the sunlight, Colaprete said. For at least 10 minutes, those particles will linger above the lunar surface and shimmer.
Although the exact impact date has not yet been determined, NASA scientists will coordinate its timing so that it is most visible from Hawaii, a prime location for viewing space phenomena. High-powered telescopes there can zoom in on the collision and potentially offer researchers even more helpful data not gleaned from outer space.
Because the spacecraft flying through the plume will only have several minutes to collect and transmit data before its own demise, the mission is considered by NASA officials to be high-risk, something not lost on the workers who have been logging long hours bringing the mission to life.
“It gives you heartburn some nights,” discussing the things that could go wrong in the mission, Colaprete said.
“But the kid in me thinks this is totally cool,” he said. “Not only are we going to be making our own crater on the moon, we’re making it in a place where no other vehicle or person has ever been to.”
Contact Julie Sevrens Lyons at jlyons@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5989.
