Spaceflight Now has a great feature on the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, a NASA mission set for launch in October. LCROSS, built on a relative shoestring budget of $79 million, will guide a spent Centaur rocket stage into the moon in a search for frozen water.
“The Centaur, playing an unprecedented role in a space mission, will be used as a projectile to dive into a crater shrouded in darkness near one of the moon’s poles,” Spaceflight Now’s Stephen Clark writes. “An array of space-based telescopes and ground observatories will be used to analyze the material ejected from deep within the target crater in an effort to determine the extent of hypothesized water ice deposits there.”
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