Below The Beltway

Around 7:30 EST today, the United States bombed the Moon:

A pair of NASA spacecraft smashed into the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, as part of a mission aimed at blasting up signs of water ice.

Pictures of the impact zone were beamed back live to Earth, but the video imagery did not show any signs of a flash.

“It’s hard to tell what we saw there,” said Michael Bicay, director of science at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California

The first crash took place at 7:31 a.m. ET. That’s when an empty rocket that weighed 2.2 tons hit the crater Cabeus. It was expected to create a crater about 66 feet (20 meters) wide, which is half the length of an Olympic pool. The blast should have kicked up a plume of lunar debris about six miles (10 kilometers) high.

Scientists hoped an analysis of the debris would confirm the theory that water — a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon — is hidden below the barren moonscape.

Trailing behind the rocket was the lunar probe LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross. For four minutes, the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft sent Earth live pictures of the rocket stage’s expected impact zone in multiple wavelengths — and then plunged into the crater itself.

Here’s the video (which is made better by the Sinatra “Fly Me To The Moon” intro):

Of course, the truth is that we didn’t get to see the real results of the bombing, which revealed a massive alien base just under the surface.