LCROSS

3, 2, 1.

Main engine ignition and liftoff of the Atlas V rocket with LRO/LCROSS.

So the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA mission which has been in orbit around the Moon since 2009, so we're up to 17 years now.

Um, and I've been involved with the mission since, since it began.

You know, when we talk about colonizing the moon, all we've really done, you know, for the last 50 years is just drop probes and landers and various things on the moon.

And the most important of which, I think, was the LCROSS mission.

That's the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that we started building it in 2006.

We launched it in 2009.

Hydrogen ions from the Sun had been slamming into oxygen-rich minerals on the lunar surface for eons, creating hydroxyl groups and, in some cases, actual water molecules locked inside the crystal structure of the rock itself.

The following year, NASA deliberately crashed a spent rocket stage into a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole as part of a mission called LCROSS.

The impact threw up a plume of debris and instruments aboard a trailing spacecraft analysed what came out of the darkness.

The answer was water ice.

One, so one of the first readers of Inside the Box was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was the first chief knowledge officer at NASA, which mean- he's sort of like a psychologist who's in charge of organizational learning from both mistakes and, and successes.

And he was reading and said, "I have to tell you about this project called LCROSS, where the engineers ended up with half the time and the budget that they expected." So what did they do? Well, they complained and said, "We need more time, and we need more money."

[laughs]

And then a team leader said, "Well, let's say we were going to solve this.

I'm like, why would you go to Mars before you go to at least the moon?

And the LCROSS mission, which discovered the Shackleford Crater, which is in the Schrodinger's Basin, which is on the south pole of the moon.

It was an experiment that was a, shall we say, a backup plan because the ship that we sent was actually a very advanced spectrometer and it developed a fuel leak and all the fuel leaked out.

So it could not go around the moon anymore.

Now, NASA, within the last 12 hours, has released before and after photos of the Falcon 9 upper stage crash site.

Those photos were provided by our LCROSS team.

lunar orbiting observation surveillance satellite that has been up there for over a decade.

So we may not have seen the exact crash, but we were certainly able to monitor what happened or the situation before and then right after the crash.

So it's happened in low-Earth orbit before, so we don't want that to happen in lunar orbit, so dispose of it as best you can.

You mentioned the discovery of water at the south pole of the Moon as well, and that brings up the LCROSS mission for me-

Mm-hmm

... which was another one of those purposeful crashes into the Moon.

[laughs]

And he's, he's a very c- very cool dude, very cool engineer.

And, uh, LCROSS was such a neat mission.

They launched it with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it was a spacecraft that was attached to the Centaur upper stage of the Atlas V rocket that had, that had launched it, and they did a pretty, they did a pretty weird orbit kinda hanging around the Earth-Moon system until they finally lined it up using the gravity of the Earth and the Moon together to smack it into the south pole, like you mentioned.