LCROSS impact anticlimactic
Talk about all dressed-up with no place to go. I planned to record the impact of the LCROSS mission from the driveway in front of my house. I lugged out and set-up my Meade LX200 10″ telescope, firewire camera and laptop. Impact was scheduled for 5:31AM local time.
While setting up, I caught sight of a massive fireball to the northwest. I estimate it was -7 magnitude. It left a luminous smear on my retina as it sparked with ablation towards the western horizon. Once I finished getting the gear ready, I covered it to protect it from what I sensed would be a heavy dew and went inside to get a nap.
I woke at about 4AM and took final steps to ready myself and the scope for impact. I later leaned that I slept through the appearance of an even more incredible fireball that streaked across the sky at 2:04AM. Estimates of that fireball’s magnitude were about -12 as bright as a full moon.
The clip below is from my friend Thomas Ashcraft. His fireball meteor observatory is about 25 miles from my home.
Click on the image to see a movie of the fireball.
During the minutes just before impact, I struggled with the video feed from the camera attached to my telescope. The feed was broken and choppy. It was hard to focus and be sure I had the camera correctly aimed on the lunar south pole near the target zone at crater Cabeus. At least sky conditions were good and my telescope was tracking properly.
Just in the nick of time, I changed one of the settings on my camera and the view snapped into clarity. I made a quick adjustment to focus and re-framing the view started video capture to my hard drive. As impact time arrived, I stood transfixed by the laptop display. There was no noticeable change at the target site. No flash, no plume just a bunch of craters and ridges looking like they have for billions of years.
I ducked inside to check NASA-TV. I wondered if the impact time had been altered. Nope, the broadcast was showing the last images from the Shepherding Spacecraft as it approached the Moon. Hmmm, models of the impact suggested that earthbound telescopes including amateur sized equipment would likely see something.
No one had ever tried an impact near the lunar poles before. Regardless of the models and media hype, I guess no one could really project what would actually be visible. Memories of the hype surrounding comet Kahoutek trickled through my mind. Major observatories around the world and even the Hubble Space Telescope reported negative observations. In its final moments and with the best seat in the house, the LCROSS Sheperding Spacecraft did detect a flash in the mid-Infrared as the Centaur rocket stage impacted the Moon.
While the mission was successful, it was disappointing for folks expecting to see something. But, not seeing a plume above the lunar surface is also meaningful to scientists. It will likely be a number of weeks or months before all the data is interpreted.
I am confident that if any ejecta or flash from the impact was visible to amateur sized equipment, I would have recorded it.
