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- Efforts to find water by crashing the Lunar Prospector
into the moon failed to detect any signs of water, scientists say.
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- Earth and space-based telescopes watched as the probe
smashed into the lunar surface on July 31. Observers hoped the impact would
produce traces of vaporized ice.
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- Lunar Prospector has spent nearly two years studying
the moon's geology. Scientists announced last year that Lunar Prospector
had detected evidence of large deposits of frozen water in craters at the
moon's poles - about 6 billion metric tons of it, enough to support lunar
colonies or manufacturing facilities on the moon.
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- Mission scientists, including Dr. David Goldstein of
the University of Texas, are presenting their findings this week in Italy
at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society,s Division of Planetary
Sciences.
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- "As expected, we didn't make a big splash or we
would have seen the water signal quickly," Goldstein said in a prepared
statement.
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- After prospector finished its mission, scientists planned
a controlled crash to try to detect the presence of water.
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- Researchers say some of the possible reasons the probe
failed to find water include:
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- *The spacecraft might have missed the target.
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- *The spacecraft might have hit a rock or dry soil at
the target site.
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- *Water molecules may be firmly bound in rocks as hydrated
minerals, rather than existing as free ice crystals, and the crash lacked
enough energy to separate water from hydrated minerals.
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- *No water exists in the crater and the hydrogen detected
earlier by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft was simply pure hydrogen.
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- *Pre-impact studies were inadequate.
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- *Parameters used in modeling the vapor gas dynamics were
inadequate.
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- *The telescopes, which have a very small field of view,
may not have been pointed correctly.
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- *Water and other materials may not have risen above the
crater wall or otherwise may have jetted away from the telescopes' view.
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- Goldstein said he'd like to search for water again using
techniques developed with the impact of Lunar Prospector. "If we can
identify any other spacecraft whose useful life is over, but may have sufficient
fuel and controllability to repeat the impact experiment, we'd like to
do it again," he said.
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