H2O on the Moon?

I came accross this interesting story about a plan to beat up the moon that sounds pretty interesting. Check this out:

Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon’s South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.

The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA’s history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations.

“I think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude, but it’s very economical,” said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the mission at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

NASA’s previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the moon’s poles before crashing itself into a crater at the lunar South Pole. Now the much larger Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, set for a February 2009 moon crash, will take aim and discover whether some of that hydrogen is locked away in the form of frozen water.

LCROSS will piggyback on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission for an Oct. 28 launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket equipped with a Centaur upper stage. While the launch will ferry LRO to the moon in about four days, LCROSS is in for a three-month journey to reach its proper moon smashing position. Once within range, the Centaur upper stage doubles as the main 4,400 pound (2,000 kg) impactor spacecraft for LCROSS.

The smaller Shepherding Spacecraft will guide Centaur towards its target crater, before dropping back to watch - and later fly through - the plume of moon dust and debris kicked up by Centaur’s impact. The shepherding vehicle is packed with a light photometer, a visible light camera and four infrared cameras to study the Centaur’s lunar plume before it turns itself into a second impactor and strikes a different crater about four minutes later.

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This comes as the latest mission to apply brute force to science.

The Deep Impact mission made history in 2005 by sending a probe crashing into comet Tempel 1. Besides Lunar Prospector’s grazing strike on the moon in 1999, the European Space Agency’s Smart-1 satellite dove more recently into the lunar surface in 2006.

LCROSS will take a much more head-on approach than either Lunar Prospector or Smart-1, slamming into the moon’s craters at a steep angle while traveling with greater mass at 1.6 miles per second (2.5 km/s). The overall energy of the impact will equal 100 times that of Lunar Prospector and kick up 1,102 tons of debris and dust.