A lunar event sceduled for 5pm (IST) on 9th October could be straight out a sc-fi thriller. Zooming at a velocity of nearly 8,000 kmph, a 2,305kg Nasa spacecraft known as Centaur will slam onto the south pole of the Moon with such force that it will throw up 350 tonnes of lunar soil and debris and create a 13-feet-deep crate. The crater, 6.6 metres in diametre, will be one-third the size of a football field.

Four minutes after the crash, another spacecraft called Shepherding will fly in the same path through the cloud of debris and crashland on lunar surface, throwing up another 150 tonnes of material at a point close to the previous crater.

Why kick up so much lunar dust? The purpose of this first-of-its-kind lunar crash mission is to locate water and confirm Chandrayaan-1 ’s discovery of water molecules on the Moon in September. Finding water has far reaching consequences for manned lunar flights and setting up a permanent human habitat on the Moon.

Quest for water on lunar surface

Originally, they were to crashland at a crater called Cabeus A. But using data from Chandrayaan-1 and even the Japanese mooncraft Kaguya, the location of the impact on the Moon was moved.

Exploring another manned mission

In fact the US is exploring the possibility of another manned mission to the Moon in 2020 and India has not entirely ruled out the possibility . At an international astronautical meet to be held in South Korea next week, India is participating in a session on manned missions.

Impact will be observed all over the world

The impact by the Centaur spacecraft, which will be observed by several observatories all over the world, is taking place almost 10 years after Nasa’s Lunar Prospector crash landed on the Moon. The Prospector, and the earlier Nasa mission, Clementine, searched for water on Moon, but failed to produce definite results.
The Mount Abu observatory, which is a part of the Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), an Isro-affliate , is making arrangements to study the post-impact period. Both Centaur and Shepherding spacecraft are a part of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite which was launched on June 18.