>> GAVRT Welcome, teachers and classes.

Most of you already know who I am.

Kim been el, manager of educational projects for GAVRT.

I'm sitting in Mission Control.

You might recognize a few of the people behind me here.

Kelly and Nancy are the GAVRT operators.

You'll be seeing them a little bit in here as they're working.

We don't have a class online right now but also joining me is Cheryl Thompson, the manager of our corporate relations here at the Lewis Center.

I'm glad that you guys were able to join in today so any GAVRT teachers, as you come onto this webcast, please sign in with your name and school so we'll know who is joining us today.

I would like to thank NASA Ames for so generously hosting this webcast and taking the time to introduce you guys to the LCROSS mission.

As NASA goes back to the Moon.

I would like to introduce right now Brian Day, astronomer and education and public outreach lead at LCROSS.

He's at NASA Ames.

He'll be giving you some information about the LCROSS mission and how you will be able to participate, you and your students, in the mission.

With Brian is Linda Conrad.

She is their web coordinator, event coordinator at NASA Ames and she'll be handling your questions throughout the webcast.

So during the webcast all during the next hour you guys will be able to type in questions at the website and we'll see how many Brian Day gets to answer in the next hour.

So without further adieu I'll turn it over to NASA Ames.

Brian and Linda, take it away.

>> Thank you very much, Kim.

Good morning to all of the GAVRT teachers out there.

It's morning here.

I understand we're probably covering quite a few time zones out there.

What I would like to do today is give you an overview of the LCROSS mission.

It's a very exciting mission and it's a mission in which you and your students will be able to directly participate.

So with that let's take a look at an overview of the LCROSS mission.

LCROSS is a precursor mission.

It will precede any human exploration coming up on the Moon.

One thing that human explorers will need when they get to the Moon is water.

Now, we could carry water there but water is pretty expensive to carry.

It costs somewhere around $100,000 a gallon just to get from the surface of the Earth to the surface of the Moon.

And we feel fairly confident that astronauts on the Moon would want a lot more than one gallon of water.

If there were deposits of water on the Moon and we could live off the land, so to speak, that would make that kind of exploration a lot easier.

However, one thing we know from the samples of lunar material that were brought back by the Apollo astronauts is that the moons rocks and soils are very dry containing less water than meteorites.

There are ways to get water out of the lunar surface in terms of baking hydrogen and oxygen out of the soil and combining it to make water.

But life would be a whole lot easier and cheaper if we could just find deposits of water on the Moon itself.

They may actually be there.

It turns out we have a couple of really fascinating clues.

The Clementine mission back in 1994 was bouncing radar beams off the surface of the Moon and discovered that the way those beams reflected when they bounced off the poles of the Moon was characteristic of the way they would bounce off if they had bounced through crystals of water ice.

Some people see that as being very indicative of water ice at the poles but other people look at the same data and they're not so sure.

Another interesting piece of evidence came up with the lunar prospector mission in 1999.

Lunar prospector discovered that there are excess concentrations of hydrogen at both the north and south pole of the Moon.

We don't think it's elemental hydrogen, that wouldn't remain on the surface of the Moon very long.

It would escape into space.

It's probably in the form of some compound, H2O, water ice seems like a logical choice but it's important to point out that what we have found is hydrogen and not necessarily water.

In an effort to try and understand this, at the end of the lunar prospector mission it was directed to crash into the south pole of the Moon to try to develop a plume of material that we could use to actually analyze and see if there is any indication of water ice.

However, because lunar prospector was a small spacecraft it didn't have a lot of mass, it was in lunar orbit and came in at a shallow angle the end result was we didn't get a very good plume to analyze so we still don't know.

It was an interesting approach.

So how could there be water at the lunar poles?

Well the sunlight is coming in essentially horizontally to the poles of the Moon and craters at the poles of the Moon will have their rim sticking up in a way such that those rims will shadow the floors of those craters.

Those craters will remain perpetually shadowed and they have been dark and very cold for a very long time, billions of years in some cases.

So how much water might there be?

These cold traps, these dark areas, could be excellent areas where water ice could accumulate.

So if we take a look, we can do kind of a back of the envelope calculation and look at how much permanently shadowed terrain is there on the Moon?

And you can make certain assumptions about how quickly water ice might accumulate and you can get something around 2% of the volume of the great salt lake in Utah.

Not a huge amount but still that is appreciable.

So where are we going to look?

Right now we're targeting a series of craters at the south pole of the Moon.

Craters, again, whose floors have areas that are permanently shadowed, therefore could be good prospects for water ice to accumulate.

So how are we going the look for water?

We're going the look with two different spacecraft that will launch together.

The lunar reconnaissance orbiter LRO and the lunar observation satellite, LCROSS.

LRO is going to go into orbit around the Moon.

It will map the Moon in very, very fine detail.

It will also characterize the thermal and radiation environment of the Moon.

LRO will go into a circular polar orbit only 50 kilometers above the surface of the Moon.

This means its cameras will be able to get pictures that will be sub meter resolution.

So we'll actually be able to see the hardware that was left behind by the previous Apollo missions, exciting stuff.

LCROSS has somewhat of a more simple mission concept.

It is going to hold on to the upper stage of the Moon rocket, the launch's LRO in LCROSS and it will use that upper stage as an impactor.

That upper stage is going to hit the floor of one of these permanently shadowed craters at 2.5 kilometers per second or 5600 miles-per-hour to create a huge ejector cloud that could reach over the Moon.

We'll analyze that ejecta cloud to see if we can find any presence of water.

We estimate that there will be a minimum of 200 metric tons of material thrown up into the Moon's sky.

The crater will be -- that we create will be about 20 to 25 meters in diameter and about 3 to 5 meters deep.

The LCROSS mission itself consists of two main components.

There is that centaur upper stage that is our impacter.

It is also the upper stage rocket that gets us out of Earth orbit and to the Moon.

Then the shepherding spacecraft, this is really the brains of the mission.

This has the instrumentation to measure and analyze the plume that the centaur will create and it also guides and targets the centaur to the appropriate target crater.

Aboard LCROSS the instrumentation consists of cameras working in the visible, near and mid infrared as well as spectrometers working in the visible and infrared as well as a total luminous spec tomorrow tear.

Both are scheduled to launch together in June of 2009.

Hey, that's next month.

So things are getting close here.

We'll talk a little bit about that more here.

So shortly after launch, we will get into Earth orbit and fire the engine of the centaur to take us out of Earth orbit.

In this diagram you can see the centaur firing its engine stacked on top of the centaur is the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, and in between LRO and the centaur is LCROSS.

You have the centaur, LCROSS and LRO.

About two hours after launch LRO will separate and continue on its own path toward the Moon.

LCROSS remains attached to that centaur.

About five days after launch it will execute a fly-by of the Moon and use the Moon's gravity to swing us into a highly inclined orbit around the entire Earth/Moon system.

This is a big sweeping orbit that takes 38 days to make one loop and we'll make several of them.

The idea here is that when we meet up with the Moon again, we will do so at a very steep angle relative to the Moon's pole.

About nine hours before the end of the mission, we will separate from the centaur after having carefully targeted it at our permanently shadowed crater.

LCROSS will use its engines to pull back away from the centaur so that it is following behind the centaur by four minutes.

The centaur again with a mass of 2000 kilograms hits the floor of that crater at 5600 miles-per-hour creating this huge plume of debris.

We'll have a bird's eye view of it from the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft.

The exciting thing is we have a camera on board and so we'll be beaming that information back to you in your classroom so you can see that.

During the next four minutes, the LCROSS spacecraft will descend directly into that plume of debris sampling it, measuring it, letting us know if there is any water ice and if so, how much.

The impact will also be observed from here on Earth.

I should say impacts.

Because one very important thing to keep in mind is four minutes after that centaur hits, the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft hits, too, creating a second plume.

Now, the LCROSS spacecraft obviously won't be able to view that second plume because, well, it created it.

But the crate observatories here on Earth will be observing both plumes.

We anticipate the Hubble space telescope, which is having a servicing mission launched just today, will be observed and spacecraft in orbit around the Moon such as LRO will also be observing.

The ground-based observatories are being picked, the timing is such really that it will allow observation primarily from the great observatories of Hawaii and the western United States.

But we also believe that the impact could be visible in amateur telescopes.

So if your school has a telescope and if the timing is right, the Moon is in the sky for you that night, we strongly recommend that you take your telescope out and observe this event.

If you're capable of taking pictures through your telescope please do so and share those pictures with us.

But the best way that your school can participate in the LCROSS mission is through the GAVRT student telemetry program.

You teachers have been trained on the GAVRT dishes already so you're already experienced at this.

But what we want to do is give you another target.

Because during the several months of big looping orbit, we're going to want some help.

Specifically from you and your students.

During the typical cruise mode of our mission, we will be communicating with our spacecraft on an average of a two-hour window once every three days.

Now, any time there is a critical maneuver, we'll obviously be talking to our spacecraft.

But during just normal cruise, we'll be using the deep space network two hour window once every six days.

Should the spacecraft for some reason go into safe mode, need some sort of a reset, then it could be up to three days before we know about it.

Now, when that happens, typically the spacecraft will start transmitting on its om any directional antenna letting us know it needs some attention.

Since we're only listening over those set period of time, it could be up to three days before we know about it.

That's fine.

That meets mission constraints but we'd always like to do better.

We can do better because of you.

With these students in your classrooms out there having access to these wonderful dishes at gold stone you can be listening at times when we aren't.

And if there is need for us to contact the spacecraft, you may be the first to know.

And you can let us know of the situation.

Also, when we do maneuvers and do fire the engines and change our course and change our velocity, you'll be able to actually monitor the spacecraft, monitor its signal and actually do a Doppler study.

We'll let you know, here is what our velocity is before the maneuver, here is what we're hoping to achieve after the maneuver and by measuring the Doppler shift you'll be able to help us determine how well we did.

So it's an exciting opportunity.

Another exciting time is going to be actually as we approach the Moon for that final dive to impact.

And the good news now is that the timing of this is such that it looks like this is going to happen while the Moon is high in the sky as seen from Goldstone.

That means students using the GAVRT assets should be able to track the spacecraft as it makes that final descent to the Moon.

That will be very exciting.

Timing, of course, is everything.

The LCROSS mission in 2009 corresponds with the international year of astronomy.

Maybe you've been making use of that in your classroom.

This is 400 years since Galileo first pointed his telescope up to the sky.

It is also corresponding with the International Polar Year, the study of the poles.

NASA is a big participant in that.

Two on Earth, two on Mars and two on the Moon and it also corresponds with the 50th anniversary of NASA and the 40th anniversary of our first landing of humans on the Moon.

It is a pretty auspicious time.

Speaking of time, what is happening right now?

As I mentioned, we're getting close to a launch and things are getting pretty exciting down at the Cape.

How are we launching?

We're launching on an Atlas V rockets.

The early Atlas rockets were used getting humans into Earth orbit in the mercury mission.

Since then there have been a number of additions to the family of Atlas rockets.

We're currently in the Atlas V version.

It has been used to launch the Mars reconnaissance orbiter in March of 2004 and to launch the new horizons mission to Pluto and beyond in 2006.

We'll be launching from launch complex 41 at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This is a historic location.

The probes to the Sun were launched from there.

The Vikings probes to Mars were launched from launch complex 41.

The deep space missions and fly by missions were lost from there and MLO and new horizons have been launched from there.

A lot of space exploration that comes out of launch 41 and we'll be adding to that list.

What is happening?

The Atlas V has arrived in a great big cargo jet at Kennedy Space Center.

It was unloaded.

It's taken to this building, the vertical integration facility that is right next to launch complex 41.

It comes in on a trailer but then gets lifted into a vertical position.

Once it's in a vertical position, then the second stage has arrived, the centaur upper stage, and that has been hoisted up on top and stacked on top of the first stage of the Atlas.

The next thing to happen will be the LRO and LCROSS, the payloads will be stacked on top of that.

Once everything is stacked and fueled and ready to go the entire launch vehicle rolls out on a set of train tracks accompanied by a series of vans that provide electricity, communication and data to the spacecraft and it rolls out on these train tracks to the launch pad and we're scheduled for launch next month in June.

This would correspond to an early October impact.

We're thinking somewhere around the October 7-11 time frame.

Our impact is going to be targeting the south pole of the Moon.

So some very exciting times are at hand.

With that what I would like to do is field some questions and Linda is here to help us field your questions.

>> Okay, great.

One thing I will mention for those of you who recognize that those slides are pretty small on the screen, we will be putting the slides up as well on the same page so you'll be able to look at them up close and comfortable.

First question, I understand it comes from Germany.

It's from Wynny at Kaiser middle school.

If you did find a form of water on the Moon, how much would be necessary?

>> Well, we'd be interested in any amount of water ice that we find on the Moon.

There is a utilitarian viewpoint.

It would be nice to have water on the Moon if we're going to have astronauts exploring the Moon.

You think of water primarily for drinking but there are a lot of other uses.

You can break the water apart into hydrogen, oxygen, oxygen for breathing, hydrogen for fuel.

There is plenty of water you could end up using it to mix with the lunar soil in making a building material.

Kind of a lunar concrete.

But even if it's smaller amounts and it doesn't lend itself to these, you know, utilitarian uses, it still would have great scientific value.

We have some really strong questions as to the formation of water ice in the inner solar system.

Remember that our environment here on Earth doesn't end with the atmosphere.

We live in the inner solar system and the environment of the inner solar system can have a profound effect on us.

And so it's very interesting to know within the inner solar system just where and how can water ice form and accumulate.

Also, this could help us answer the question how did water get here to the Earth?

Where did it come from?

A lot of scientists think it probably didn't originate here in the inner solar system.

It's pretty warm here.

It may have been delivered to us from the outer solar system by comets, so finding any amount of water ice would be of great interest from a scientific point of view in helping us answer these types of questions.

>> Great.

Okay.

Question here from Wally at Menwith hill in the United Kingdom.

He asks, how was the decision made to pick the crash or the impact site?

>> Excellent question.

How are we deciding just where the impact is going to happen?

First of all you want to find a crater that is big enough that we feel very confident that we're going to be able to hit it.

You want to make sure that it does, in fact, have a permanently shadowed floor.

That it is a relatively old crater and therefore has had the time to hopefully accumulate water.

Let's talk about that.

That's an excellent question.

Where do we think the water came from?

Do we think the water came from the body that hit and made that crater?

No, probably not.

The immense amount of energy that would be generated in that impact would vaporize any water and it could escape into space.

So what we think happens is we have these craters that are permanently shadowed.

They're cold traps and as later impacts happen on the Moon, any time a comet or a meteorite hits, you get this very brief, very tenuous atmosphere on the Moon.

And any -- most of that atmosphere is going to escape into space fairly quickly.

Any of that atmosphere that enters into one of these permanently-shadowed craters encounters a cold trap and any water vapor that may be in that atmosphere could condense in that intense cold.

You want a crater that is old and has had a chance to really accumulate hopefully a large amount of water.

Also one of the things that is going to be a very key consideration in our picking of the crater is something called vibration.

That ties to its position on the surface of the Moon.

The Moon tilts and wobbles back and forth in the sky.

Sometimes the south pole is pointed away from us and sometimes toward us.

At any given particular impact time, we want the look at craters that are not going to be pointed away from us.

We want to make sure that they are visible.

And then one other consideration will be as we have spacecraft that are in orbit around the Moon, so we will have LRO.

We currently do have one from India and they are returning data.

They will be returning data about these target craters, these potential target craters.

As we get better information about the craters it will help us refine that choice.

We have up to 30 days before impact to make the final decision as to exactly where we're going to impact.

Good question.

Thank you.

>> Good follow-up to that would be will the impact hurt the Moon or change its orbit?

>> Excellent question.

We get asked that a lot.

And fortunately the answer is no.

If you take a small telescope out and look at the Moon, you'll see a number of really nice-looking craters, one of them say like -- some of the biggest impact features on the Moon the MARI basins are considerably larger than that.

The largest impact basin on the Moon is the AIKEN basin over 2,000 kilometers across.

The Moon has been getting battered by meteorites for billions of years and some are leaving craters that are 10 to 100s and thousands of kilometers in diameter.

On that scale a 20 meter crater doesn't even register.

The size of crater that we are going to be creating on the Moon happens naturally on the average of about two times a month from just meteor oid impacts.

The difference here is we'll know exactly when and where to look in advance.

Good question.

>> We have one here from Dee.

Hello, we're from camp Kemp.

Why was the title LCROSS selected?

>> One of the things that we love here at NASA are acronyms, NASA is an acronym.

National aeronautics space administration.

LCROSS is lunar crater observation and sensing satellite, it's kind of an acronym.

The R comes from the word crater so we have two letters from crater but again it's one of our favorite things, an acronym.

>> Okay.

And same person follows up with if you find water, what's next?

>> That's a great question.

If we find water, what are we going to do?

You're going to get first a whole bunch of scientists will get together and look at that information and look at that data.

If there are sizeable amounts of water, there will probably be some discussions as to if we want to mount a follow-up mission to actually obtain samples of that water.

What it will do, though, is certainly spark a great discussion between NASA and a number of other space agencies as to how that information is going to help us shape our combined future efforts for lunar exploration.

There is a lot of impetus to explore the Moon.

The Moon has become a very busy place with missions going to it from a number of countries.

And what we're trying to do now is answer some key questions about the Moon that will help us decide how our future exploration will continue.

>> Great.

I like this next question here.

It is from -- I'm trying to find out -- normal north high school.

Are you concerned about losing any of the water you do find in the crater due to the impact itself?

>> There will be some loss, but again, keep in mind that there are a number of these permanently shadowed craters at the north and south poles.

So we're just going to be sampling one of these craters and just a portion, a small portion of the floor of one of these.

So we would not cause the elimination of a significant percentage of any water should there be water there.

But an excellent question.

>> Okay.

Here is one from Donovan Moore back to the U.K.

Why is it so cold on the Moon?

>> Well, that all depends on when and where you look.

So if you look at the equator, the temperature on the Moon varies.

The daytime temperature on the equator is somewhere around 260 degrees Fahrenheit or 127C.

It's hot.

A lot hotter than you would ever want to experience without significant protection.

The nighttime temperature on the Moon, however, is quite cold.

Again, this is the equatorial region.

It's about 280 degrees Fahrenheit below zero or minus 173 C.

So pretty darn cold.

Why is the extreme so great?

The Moon is as far away from the Sun on average as the Earth is.

What's the difference?

Well, the difference is that the Earth has this atmosphere that can help moderate the heat and the extremes.

But the Moon has virtually no atmosphere.

So as a result, the daytime temperatures are extremely intense.

As soon as the Sun sets, the heat is free to escape and the surface becomes very, very cold.

Now, that's at the equator.

In the Moon in these permanently shadowed craters the temperature is even more extremely cold.

We estimate somewhere around minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 240 degrees below zero C.

So extremely cold but that's why we think those areas would be good places to actually look for water.

Excellent question.

>> That is cold.

Okay.

A question here from Patricia Gregory.

If we do find water, how will you determine if there is enough to support human life?

>> Well, that's a good question.

The first what we're going to be doing is looking at the composition of that plume.

So we're going to make an assumption that we have impacted roughly a standard area, more or less average area of permanently shadowed terrain.

Then when we see this plume of material come up we'll be able to measure its composition and determine if there is any water vapor in there and if so, how much.

Now, you may point out that one is not necessarily stat isically significant sample and if you did so you'd be absolutely right.

We'll have two impacts that will help us.

Keep in mind the centaur impact and the shepherding spacecraft impact while they'll both be on the floor of the same crater they won't be in exactly the same place.

So that's going to be valuable to look at and compare the information on the two plumes.

But you raise a very good question.

If there is water ice on the Moon, it may not be a nice, uniform distribution.

It may be patchy.

So it's important to point out that if we do not find any water vapor in the plume we create.

That doesn't necessarily mean there is no water there.

It means that there is no water where exactly where we hit.

So absence of proof is not proof of absence in this case.

But this is our first opportunity and it is a very important opportunity to actually potentially get our hands wet, if you will.

Reach into one of these areas where we think there may be water ice and bring that material up into the sunlight to actually see if there is something there.

>> Great.

Question here from mark at San Mateo high school up the road from us.

Is the best angle of impact as close to 90 degrees as you can get or is there a better angle to kick up more ejecta.

>> Steep is good, yes.

We want to come in as steep as we can and that is really the whole impetus behind this idea of using the lunar gravity assist to swing us into this inclined orbit.

So as close to 90 degrees as you can get is very good.

Some of our -- I think a lot of our impact scenarios have us at over 70 degrees.

Some have us over 80 degrees coming in.

>> Okay.

Question again from Patricia Gregory.

Will the launch be visible on the web through NASA?

>> Wonderful, wonderful question.

Yes!

The launch will be visible.

In fact, you can demonstrate this for yourself today at 11:00 we're expecting to see a shuttle launch, hopefully.

So if you go to www.NASA.gov you'll see a link for NASA TV.

If you have NASA TV in your classroom you can turn on your TV.

We'll be broadcasting as we're broadcasting the launch of the shuttle today we'll be broadcasting the launch of LCROSS and LRO next month.

Also, when it comes time for the impact, we'll be broadcasting that again.

Www.NASA.gov or tune in to NASA TV.

Great question.

>> D.M. from Oklahoma wants to know, will you see this from a telescope set up in the backyard or what size scope will you need to watch it?

>> How big a telescope do you need?

That's a great question.

Keep in mind we have never done this before.

So we're not exactly sure what it is going to look like.

We are saying that it's best if you have a 10 to 12 inch telescope.

If you have something that size or larger, we're feeling pretty good about your chances of being able to see it.

But some of the models have the plume being bright enough it could be seen in significantly smaller telescope.

I'm reminded of the time that comet Schumacher levy 9 impacted into the clouds of Jupiter and great debate as to what we were going to see in advance of that impact.

There were many people who thought we wouldn't see a thing at all.

I had to admit I was one of those.

Was I glad to be wrong.

As a matter of fact the impact features were visible even in small telescopes.

Regardless of the size of telescope you have, point it to the Moon that night and see what you can see.

We'd be very interested in hearing your results.

>> A question from Stephanie and Lindsey, also from the U.K.

Why does carrying water from Earth cost so much?

>> Well, space flight right now is still a fairly expensive proposition.

And so the cost in terms of hardware, launch vehicle, in terms of fuel, of getting any mass into Earth orbit is significant.

Now, the cost of getting water to the Moon is not special because it's water.

It's just the cost of getting any amount of material is significant.

The more something weighs the more it costs to get into the Moon.

Getting into Earth's orbit is expensive and getting out of the Earth's orbit to the Moon is expensive and then you have to get whatever you're carrying down to the Moon safely, which requires, again, fuel and engines and materials.

So the cost of getting anything to the surface of the Moon is significant.

The more we can find there that we can use, the better.

>> We have several questions about whether we ever do plan to live there.

And--

>> Good question.

Are we planning to actually have people live on the surface of the Moon?

And that is going to depend to a large degree on what we discover with these upcoming robotic missions to the Moon.

So it's probably important to keep in mind that we know far more about the surface of Mars than we do about the surface of our own Moon.

Seems kind of strange.

Mars is a lot further away than the Moon is.

But we've been having a lot of exploration going on on Mars's surface recently and we've had orbiters around Mars giving us exquisite detail on the surface of Mars.

We haven't been doing that up until the present time with the Moon.

So we're about to gain an understanding of the Moon that will help us, then, shape our plans for the future in terms of how we explore the Moon.

>> Okay.

Is there a certain phase of the Moon that is better for viewing than any other phase?

>> There are certain phases of the Moon that are particularly bad for viewing the LCROSS impact.

So we want to stay away from phases that are close to new Moon because that would mean the Moon is essentially in the daytime sky and obviously having the Moon in a nice big, bright sky is bad for detecting a plume coming off the surface of the Moon.

And phases really close to full Moon are probably not very good, either, because the full Moon is so bright and the glare from the full Moon could overwhelm the light coming from the plume.

So what we're looking for is a space shuttle phase Moon either before or after the full Moon.

>> Okay.

Question here, you can travel to the Moon in a relatively short period of time.

Why is it going to take you three to four months to arrive?

>> Good question.

Again, we will make our initial pass of the Moon in only five days.

So five days after launch we'll make that first pass.

But if we went directly from the Earth to the pole of the Moon, tell you what, I'm going to ask for -- can we grab that globe of the Moon there real quick?

We've got -- okay.

So if we went directly from the Earth to the Moon -- thank you very much, Greg.

Look at that.

Here is the Moon.

If you go from the Earth to the equator you can come straight in.

Straight in coming at a high angle is important.

If you go from the Earth directly to the pole, look at this, you're coming in at a tangent, very low angle.

We don't want to do that.

We want to come in like this.

So what that means is going directly from the Earth to the Moon isn't really going to cut it for us.

Instead what we do is when we come from the Earth to the pole of the Moon, we'll use the Moon's gravity to swing us down and around into this big looping orbit around the entire Earth/Moon system so that when we do reencounter the Moon again we'll come in at this very steep angle relative to the Moon's poles.

Excellent question.

>> A personal question here from Wally.

Do you feel privileged to be part of this mission?

>> Oh, wow, very, very much so.

This is by far the most exciting job I have ever had.

It is an amazing experience.

For me to actually get to be a part of this mission during its entire lifetime.

I got to be a part of the original proposal to this.

I was a small part of that proposal but to have been on this mission from the time that it was first proposed all the way until its completion is an amazing experience.

There are also some of the most incredible, brilliant, exciting people that I've ever met who are working on and leading this mission.

To be part of a team like that is really special.

But for me, I think the most special thing is the way this mission actually gets to incorporate students and members of the public.

This is not something that the average person just has to watch.

They can actually be an active participant in this mission.

This mission belongs to all of us and to have the opportunity of working with schools, students, teachers such as yourselves in doing something really, really special, yeah, this is a great privilege.

>> All right.

How soon will you know if there is water on the Moon?

>> That's a good question.

How soon will we know?

We could know fairly quickly.

If there is significant amounts of water in the plume that we develop, we could have an announcement as early as a number of hours to a few days after the impact.

But there will be a long period of study, for months and perhaps even years, of that data refining our understanding of what we see.

But we could have some preliminary results out and will have some preliminary results just that very day.

>> That's great.

Fun.

Okay.

Jennifer asks during my recent GAVRT training we saw a video that implied that NASA plans to place an outpost on the Moon in the 2020s.

What will this entail?

>> That's still very much to be determined.

I think that the time frame and the nature of what we do in the future is going to be something that will be decided after we really have had a chance to study the Moon.

So once we know what the resources are on the Moon, is there water ice, once we know what the thermal and radiation environment is on the Moon, as we'll discover through LRO, that will help us really make the decision as to where we go from here.

>> Okay.

I just want to remind people we have little time left.

Make sure you get questions in if you need to have them answered.

Because this is the time we have Brian captive here.

All right.

Question, have you ever observed something hitting the Moon naturally before?

>> That's the great question.

As a matter of fact, yes.

There are a number of really good videos of meteorite impacts on the surface of the Moon.

There is, in fact, a program that is being run out of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and also the -- I believe it's the American Association of lunar and planetary observers.

But what they are doing is they're actually having people, especially during times like meteor showers, so something like the different meteor showers, this is a great time to point a video camera either on a telescope or a good telephoto lens at the Moon.

You want to look for the flashes that can occur when a piece of debris, meteorite hits the surface of the Moon.

Now, a lot of times you can get flashes appearing on your video either from static on the video itself or a cosmic ray hitting your detector but if you have multiple video cameras filming at the same time looking at the surface of the Moon and they're both record that flash in the same place at the same time, that is a really good indicator that what has happened is an actual meteorite impact.

We have a number of examples of that.

Good question.

>> Okay.

There is another one.

Have you ever found evidence of water on Moon rocks before?

>> Ooh, okay.

Typically, as I say, the samples that were returned by the Apollo astronauts were exceptionally dry.

But I do recall reading that in some samples of lunar material, specifically in some I believe it was in some volcanic glass, there is some small amount of water that has been detected.

Again, very, very small.

>> All right.

Jennifer asks, if water is not found on the Moon during this mission, is there a plan for another try?

Will the program move forward if there is no water found this year?

Give the current financial and political client.

Given the current financial and political climate.

>> So, again, a very good question and that requires a fairly significant crystal ball.

We don't know what we're going to find when we get to the Moon.

As I mentioned, the lack of water ice on the Moon doesn't necessarily mean that you would not be able to generate water from materials on the Moon.

We know that the mineral lattices of a number of types of rocks on the Moon contain oxygen and we know that the lunar soil contains a fair amount of hydrogen that rains in in the form of a solar wind.

So if you take a bake the rocks and soil of the Moon at 700 degrees C, you can liberate that hydrogen oxygen and you can create water.

Certainly it would be a lot easier if there is just water ice there.

But in terms of where we go from here, water is just one part of that equation.

Getting good maps of the surface of the Moon, getting a better understanding of the radiation environment of the Moon.

Getting a better understanding of the thermal environment of the Moon, all those will help us decide what our future policy is going to be and so I think there will be a lot of people who will be looking at the results of LRO and LCROSS, as well as the results from the international fleet of spacecraft that are and will be exploring the Moon as we all try to formulate where we go from here.

It all depends on what these missions find.

>> Great.

Actually that is probably a good place to wrap as we have wound up the questions that we have here.

I'll give you an opportunity to speak.

>> I want to thank you very much for your participation and for your interest and for your enthusiasm.

I hope very, very much that you will take the rare opportunity to have your students become actual members of our mission team as we explore the Moon with the LCROSS mission.

The GAVRT resources are really a unique and fantastic thing.

You've done something very special by getting trained to use those resources.

And I think now we can provide you with a fascinating target to study as you utilize your time on the GAVRT dishes.

Thank you very much.

>> We'll go now to the Lewis Center and have Kim sign off, too.

>> Yes.

Thank you all of the GAVRT teachers who were able to participate in the webcast today.

This was a great opportunity.

I hope now that you can go and try to see the launch as well.

And goodbye and we'll be in touch.

Thank you.