NEW RESEARCH ON LUNAR PROSPECTOR'S MOON CRASH DOES NOT REVEAL EVIDENCE OF WATER, UT AUSTIN AEROSPACE AND ASTRONOMY TEAM ANNOUNCES AT CONFERENCE

AUSTIN, Texas - New efforts to find evidence of water on the moon came up dry, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin announced Wednesday (Oct. 13). But their research efforts have laid the groundwork for further investigations, as well as demonstrating a potentially useful new method for lunar prospecting.

The UT Austin group announced its findings at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Padua, Italy. In what was virtually a no-budget attempt to vaporize ice suspected to exist at the South Pole of the moon, NASA worked with engineers and astronomers at UT Austin to crash the space agency's successful Lunar Prospector spacecraft in a specific polar crater in a precise manner. The July 31 crash took only seconds. But the painstaking analysis of information recorded by more than a dozen professional Earth- and space-based telescopes required several months. Hundreds of amateur telescope owners also observed as the spacecraft plunged into a permanently shadowed crater near the pole.

"The way we aimed to detect water - or its signature - was through sensitive spectrometers tuned to look for the ultraviolet spectral emission lines expected from the hydroxyl (OH) molecules," said Barker. Barker and Shim analyzed the spectra from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, McDonald telescope and the Keck I in Hawaii.

The team offered several possible reasons why the telescopic information has yielded no evidence of water, however, there is no way of knowing which of them might apply:

The spacecraft might have missed the target;
The spacecraft might have hit a rock or dry soil at the target site;
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;
No water exists in the crater and the hydrogen detected earlier by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft was simply pure hydrogen;
Pre-impact studies were inadequate;
Parameters used in modeling the vapor gas dynamics were inadequate;
The telescopes, which have a very small field of view, may not have been pointed correctly;
Water and other materials may not have risen above the crater wall or otherwise may have jetted away from the telescopes' view.