Artists conception of NASA's LCROSS spacecraft. Image Credit/NASA
NASA’s 2009 Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, was honored Tuesday night in New York City as the recipient of a Breakthrough award for innovation in science and technology from Popular Mechanics Magazine.
The lunar probe was launched on June 18, 2009, as part of NASA’s successful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission.
The LCROSS portion of the encounter took the $79 milliion spacecraft through a cloud of lunar dust and debris kicked up as the upper stage of the rocket that launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter slammed into a permanently shaded crater at the moon’s south pole.
In November, scientist announced what experts suspected, the dust plume contained frozen water. The water, in amounts equivalent to those found in the Sahara Desert, likely came from comets that impacted the moon and deposited their contents in the recesses of craters that never see sunlight.
“We chose the LCROSS mission for a Breakthrough Award because it set a new standard for low-cost, high-impact NASA programs,” said James B. Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics.
“Space exploration missions are rarely cheap, but a team from Ames and Northrop Grumman proposed a scrappy way to accomplish a monumental goal — confirming the presence of water ice on the moon,” said Meigs. “We’re thrilled to recognize the LCROSS team and all of this year’s honorees, who are making the seemingly impossible a reality.”
“The LCROSS mission truly was a technological achievement and made some game-changing discoveries in innovative ways,” said S. Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., which developed and managed science operations for the LCROSS mission. “We are honored by this recognition of the Ames and Northrop Grumman team that made this mission possible.”