Impact sur la lune :

LUNAR IMPACT PLUME: There was a plume after all. Observers on Earth
had their doubts after LCROSS and its Centaur booster rocket hit the
Moon on Friday, Oct. 9th. The twin lunar impacts failed to produce
visible plumes of debris, prompting speculation that something had
gone wrong. On the contrary, members of the LCROSS science team are
now calling the experiment "a smashing success."

Fifteen seconds after the Centaur hit the shadowy floor of crater
Cabeus, the LCROSS spacecraft flying 600 km overhead took the
following picture of a plume measuring 6 to 8 km wide:

"There is a clear indication of a plume of vapor and fine debris,"
says LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete of NASA/Ames. "The
ejecta brightness appears to be at the low end of our predictions and
this may be a clue to the properties of the material the Centaur hit."

Nine cameras and spectrometers on LCROSS captured every phase of the
Centaur's impact: the intial flash, the debris plume, and the creation
of the Centaur's crater. "We are blown away by the data returned,"
says Colaprete. "The team is working hard on the analysis and the data
appear to be of very high quality."

But did the impact reveal any water at the bottom of Cabeus? The
LCROSS team isn't ready to say yet. Combining their data with those of
other observatories and analyzing the full dataset could take weeks.
According to NASA, "any new information will undergo the normal
scientific review process and will be released as soon as it is
available."

Une cool énigme, que ça aurait fait !
Ben oui, y a de l'eau sur la lune, faut lire Tintin !

Dommage que l'on n'ai pas pu le suivre en direct au télescope (elle était déja couchée pour nous), mais les astronomes amateurs américains ont du se régaler ...

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