People Can't Feed Their Famlies, and We're Looking For Water On The Moon ?!?

Are the serious !? 35,000 people show up in Detroit the other day to recieve food that had the capacity for 3,500, and we just spent millions to see if there's water on the moon !!







A pair of NASA spacecraft smashed into the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, as part of a mission aimed at blasting up signs of water ice.


Pictures of the impact zone were beamed back live to Earth, but the video imagery did not show any signs of a flash.


"It's hard to tell what we saw there," said Michael Bicay, director of science at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.


The first crash took place at 7:31 a.m. ET. That’s when an empty rocket that weighed 2.2 tons hit the crater Cabeus. It was expected to create a crater about 66 feet (20 meters) wide, which is half the length of an Olympic pool. The blast should have kicked up a plume of lunar debris about six miles (10 kilometers) high.



Scientists hoped an analysis of the debris would confirm the theory that water — a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon — is hidden below the barren moonscape.


Trailing behind the rocket was the lunar probe LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft sent Earth live pictures of the expected impact zone.


Visible-light images showed little sign of the debris plume, but Bicay noted that thermal imagery did produce evidence of a crash.


Just four minutes after the rocket stage hits the moon, the LCROSS spacecraft completed its own fatal plunge. Telescopes around the world — including the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope — aimed their cameras at the big event to capture views of the dust-up. The data collected during the double crash will be analyzed for weeks to come.


Bicay said it was too early to gauge how much debris was thrown up by the impact. If the analysis shows no signs of water, that would run counter to recent findings suggesting that lunar soil, also known as regolith, contains more water ice than previously thought.


However, Bicay said there could be other explanations for the absence of a water signal. For example, it may be that the water is unevenly distributed — even within the permanently shadowed polar craters that are thought to be the best prospects for ice mining. Bicay said LCROSS' scientists may have come across a situation familiar to Texas oil wildcatters.


"We may have hit a dry hole rather than a wet hole," he said.





From: MSN