LCROSS: Moon Gets Bombed But No Smoke Plume

NASA's LCROSS mission to fire a rocket at the moon and measure the contents of the dust cloud was successfully executed yesterday. Although the shepherd craft successfully took spectrographic readings and the Hubble space telescope got pictures, it was not as visually spectacular as people had hoped. Initial reports from various observatories such as the Hale telescope in Palomar and the Keck observatory in Hawaii say they didn't see a dust cloud. I can imagine many amateur astronomers and those attending parties would have been disappointed too. But scientists are happy with the amount of data they have received and are in the process of analysing it, though they can't say for definite what they have seen just yet. Space.com have an LCROSS update diary here.