NASA's Moon Crash

NASA's recent lunar-punch mission apparently was not the high-profile flop it first appeared.

A clear image of a foam of debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency's rocket plowed into it has been released.

This plume reached an estimated mile above the moons surface.

This plume was takes the mission to success for measuring the dust kicked up by the centaur rocket to find out whether ice might lie hidden in polar craters that haven't seen sunlight in billions of years.

At the time, NASA scientists said they hoped the problem was simply that cameras aboard the satellite were not properly adjusted to detect the plume. But some scientists feared the Centaur might have hit bedrock and failed to create a plume. The new images, lifted from a different camera aboard the spacecraft, show that a plume did, in fact, occur. That means the satellite should have been capable of detecting water, if it was present.

read more article at latimes.