However, because the LCROSS rocket's crater is permanently obscured by shadows, my colleagues and I have struggled for a decade to determine the depth of this buried ice-rich layer. This was a crucial piece of evidence to support the idea that for billions of years, comets have been delivering water and organic compounds to the moon when they crash on its surface. By studying the composition of the dust plume lofted into the sunlight, scientists were able to find signs of a few hundred pounds of water ice that had been liberated from the moon's surface by the impact. A Dead Rocket Just Crashed Into the Moon, and Scientists Are Thrilled The impact likely obliterated the chunk of space junk in a white hot explosion. I was a part of the LCROSS mission, and it was a smashing success. If you are a fan of space, you may have experienced some déjà vu reading that description – NASA performed a similar experiment in 2009 when it intentionally crashed the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, into a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. Virtually nothing will remain of the ill-fated rocket. Over the course of several minutes, the ejected material will rain back down to the surface around the now-smoldering crater. A cloud of vaporized rock and metal will expand from the impact point as dust, and sand-sized particles are thrown skyward. The compression of the impact will heat up the dust and rocks and generate a white-hot flash that would be visible from space if there happened to be a craft in the area at the time. Original Story 1/26: Part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket weighing 4 metric tons is expected to crash into the surface of the Moon on March 4.

A twin shock wave will travel downward into the powdery top layer of the Moon's surface called the regolith.

What happend to the moon on march 4th