Moon smackdown was a dud?

SkyandTelescope.com - News Blog - LCROSS Impact: It's a Hit — But Was Anything Seen?: "At a press conference 2� hours after the impacts Monday morning, NASA's LCROSS team members were upbeat. They reported that the spacecraft and its instruments all performed 'beautifully,' but warned 'It takes a while to comb through the data.' Anthony Colaprete, the LCROSS principal investigator, said 'we saw the crater' from the Centaur rocket-body impact and recorded other high-quality data, but he declined to say anything about water yet. (LCROSS was designed to detect an amount of frost in the soil as small as 1 part in 200.)"

Comment -- The idea was that this SUV-size rocket would smash into the Moon and throw up a plume of dust possibly visible from Earth. The plume, it was hoped, would show evidence of water (or at least frost.)

Alas, the rocket crashed and nothing apparently happened. No spray of dust at all. But, as noted above, there's lots of data that still needs to be analyzed. It's possible that something really interesting will still be discovered.