By Jean-Louis Santini
Washington - Nasa is preparing a violent return to the moon on Friday as part of a mission to send a satellite and a rocket booster crashing into the planet's surface to look for water.
Conspiracy theories aside - a 'do not bomb the moon' website is already campaigning against the move - there is no actual bomb, but the US space agency's LCROSS satellite and heavier Centaur upper-stage rocket will still leave huge impact sites where Nasa hopes to find evidence of water or ice.
At 11h30 GMT, the rocket and four minutes later the spacecraft will separately race into the moon at 5 600 miles (9 000 kilometers) per hour to kick up approximately 6.2 miles (10km) of lunar dirt from the Cabeus crater floor near the planet's south pole.
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'It tells us something about how water was delivered to the moon' The flash that will follow the impact will last about 30 seconds.
A camera mounted on the 1 965-pound (891kg) Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will beam live footage back to Earth.
The carnage is also the first preparatory mission of the Constellation program that aims to bring Americans back to the moon by 2020.
"We don't anticipate anything about presence or absence of water immediately. It's going to take us some time," cautioned Anthony Colaprete, project scientist and principal investigator for the LCROSS mission, which has a $79-million budget.
Colaprete projected it would take several days for analysts to evaluate the data and several weeks to determine whether and how much hydrogen-bearing compounds were found.
For those hoping to catch a bare-eyed glimpse of the impact, the scientist had sad news.
"It's not going to be a grand spectacle that you can go outside in your back yard and see with your bare eyes or even a good binoculars. It's going to be too faint," said Colaprete.
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