This morning, the culmination of months of work was completed as the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation & Sensing Satellite) smashed into the moon’s surface. Planning the mission was no small task, and the folks at NASA Goddard previsualized various landing sites prior to the mission.
“Visualization aided two aspects of the LCROSS mission,” said Ernie Wright at the SVS. “It helped us understand how visible the plume will be from Earth and whether the targeted terrain was flat and in shadow.”
What exactly did this do?
On September 11, LCROSS mission planners announced that they had targeted a smaller, more northerly crater named Cabeus A. But later that month, analyses of new data from instruments aboard LRO, together with archival measurements from NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission of the late 1990s, indicated that the larger Cabeus crater was a better bet.
I really hope that there are no bad effects from bombing the moon. It just seems insane.